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Jakob Schiller: Nancy Mancias of CodePink arranges one of 2,000 candles, marking the number of American deaths in Iraq, lit Tuesday night during a ceremony at Lake Merritt. The candles were later floated in the lake. The event, sponsored by Veterans for Peace, was also meant to remember the thousands of Iraqis killed in the war.

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For the first eight months of the year, Berkeley proved the East Bay’s hot spot for thefts, burglaries and other forms of property crime—topping the rates for Richmond and Oakland—while the city’s crimes of violence ranked in the mid-range.

That’s the word from Police Chief Douglas N. Hambleton, who gave the City Council a detailed crime briefing Tuesday. He said his department would begin presenting the council with quarterly updates.

Tuesday’s presentation, prepared with the help of city Information Technology mapping specialist Patrick DeTemple and Sgt. Steve Odom of BPD’s Community Services Bureau, also included the unveiling of a new Internet tool for the public.

Incorporating many of the features currently used in a similar site operated by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the webpage will allow the public to see crime maps created by selecting an area and one or more types of crime.

Among the crime statisics reported by Hambleton:

• Violent crimes in the first eight months of 2005 dropped by 2.8 percent from the same period last year.

• Robberies, of which there were 223, accounted for 63 percent of all violent crimes, a decrease of 9 percent from last year, while aggravated assaults (116) increased by 6 percent from 109 in 2004; homicides dropped from 3 to 2.

• Thefts accounted for the lion’s share of property crimes (3,650 of 5,390), followed by car thefts (892), burglaries (829) and arsons (19).

• Berkeley’s homicide rate was 3.6 homicides per 100,000 residents, compared with 36.4 in Richmond and 22.5 in Oakland.

• The rate of rapes in Berkeley was 14.5 per 100,000, compared to 37.4 in Richmond and 70.2 in Oakland.

• The robbery rate was 318 per 100,000, compared to 520 in Richmond and 586.8 in Oakland.

• Berkeley’s property crime rate was 8,007.7 per 100,000, compared to 6,476.5 in Richmond and 6,015.8 in Oakland.

Councilmembers praised the mapping project.

“I’m very grateful to see objective information” made available, said Max Anderson. “It will be very helpful not only for us as policy-makers and for you, but for the community.”

Kriss Worthington, whose Southside district includes the highest concentrations of both property crimes and violent crimes, said he liked the idea, but added that he would like to see an additional factor included in the data—population density.

Noting that a two-block area of his district houses about 2,000 students, he said it’s no wonder there is a concentration of crime. Perhaps, he suggested, another tool that could be added to the mapping program would display information in a way that reflected density as well as geographic areas.

“The caveats you’re raising should be addressed,” DeTemple said.

“Density maps are very interesting,” Councilmember Gordon Wozniak said. “We need a description of a general policy where the goal is that the rates should be the same for all parts of the city. I would like to see options for what can be done within the department and other city departments to lower (the rates) within the hotspots.”

De Temple said Berkeley’s crime mapping site will include design features suggested in meetings between Odom’s bureau and members of neighborhood watch and other community groups.

“The big point to me is that for crime prevention, the better picture we have, the better outreach we can do,” Chief Hambleton said.

Included in the presentation to the council were detailed color maps pinpointing the distribution of different kinds of crimes in the city. But the bulk of the discussion focused on the current crime data in the chief’s report.

Hambleton said violent crime has been dropping throughout the country. “Now, in Berkeley, it’s lower than during the 1970s,” he said.

Violent crime figures listed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national crime report showed a larger-than-usual drop for Berkeley because of change in the city’s own reporting methods for aggravated assault, said the chief.

In previous years the city had been including crimes not reported by other cities, including robberies, assaults, kidnaps and other crimes that could have resulted in great bodily injuries but didn’t. The FBI figures specify that only those crimes that result in such injuries be included in the category.

“We corrected the figures internally in 2003, but now in time for the report to the Department of Justice,” said Hambleton, “the 2004 figures are correct.”

Worthington asked if open doors and windows accounted for part of the city’s high property crime rate, noting that college students often left dorm rooms unlocked. He also wondered if the same thing was true with auto burglaries.

“Sometimes,” said the chief, adding that “30 to 40 percent of residential burglaries are via unlocked doors and windows.”

The high rate of auto burglaries may stem in part from the large numbers of out-of-city residents who commute to Berkeley for their jobs and studies at the university. Another factor, he said, was the relatively high percentage of cars which are parked on streets overnight.

Car burglars won’t hesitate to smash windows when something of value is left in a locked car, he said. “They will break the windows if they see a handful of change, and that drives a lot of this,” he said.

In addition, most of the car thefts in Berkeley are simply the result of someone wanting wheels to drive to home to places like Oakland and Richmond, which accounts for the 88 percent recovery rate of cars stolen in the city,” Hambleton said.

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli asked the chief what percent of Berkeley crimes were committed by people who live outside the city, adding, “Where could you find more laptop computers than in the South Campus area?”

Hambleton said that the department’s last look at the issue was done a few years ago, and revealed that more than half of Berkeley’s robbery suspects came from outside city limits.

Hambleton said that the new crime displays provide a way for his department to offer better outreach to the community.

“We have concentrated a great deal of our efforts on violent crimes, and we haven’t spent as much on property crimes,” he said. With the new system, “there are opportunities for us with better analysis and coordination within the department, to do that.”

And to do that best, Hambleton said, the department needs a full-time crime analyst, a point he raised several times during Tuesday’s session.

Capitelli, who heads a real estate firm, said he was concerned that the maps might discourage people looking into renting an apartment or buying a residence in Berkeley. Similarly, he said, current residents might be discouraged by discovering they live in high crime areas.

“Rather than seeing them vote with their feet, we’d like to see them vote with their locks,” said the chief, “because a lot of the crimes are easily avoided.”

Staring in the face of a potential $1.4 million loss in annual sales tax revenue, Berkeley Planning Commissioners decided to look further into a plan to set up portions of West Berkeley as auto sales zones after hearing a bleak preliminary report from city staff at the commission’s regular meeting Wednesday night.

The changes are being urged by Mayor Tom Bates.

On a motion from commission member Susan Wengraf, commissioners authorized a workshop in which city staff, residents, auto dealer representatives, and other interested parties would be able to share information and give their views on the subject. No date was set for the workshop.

“While I’m very supportive of the West Berkeley Plan, for $1.5 million I might just cave in,” Commissioner Gene Poschman said in supporting moving forward with a study of the proposal.

But at least preliminarily, neither staff nor commissioners appeared in favor of a large concentration of dealers in one auto mall-type location or large tracts of land for individual dealerships, either.

“We won’t be necessarily looking at four acre sites,” said Land Use Planning Manager Mark Rhoades. “We’d try to get the sizes down considerably.”

Planning Commission Chairperson Harry Pollack said, “None of us have a vision of big, sprawling lots. We’d like this to be as unsprawled as possible.”

No auto dealer appeared at Wednesday’s commission meeting to make their case, and no resident spoke specifically against the proposed study. Both of those situations are expected to change as the proposal moves forward.

Berkeley has five new-vehicle dealerships accounting for 11 percent of the city’s sales tax revenue. The largest, Weatherford BMW, is located at the foot of Ashby Avenue. Three others—McKevitt Volvo Nissan, Berkeley Honda, and Toyota of Berkeley—are located along a small stretch of Shattuck Avenue between Channing Way and Derby Street, and the fifth, McNevin Cadillac & Volkswagen, is on San Pablo Avenue north of University Avenue.

Berkeley Community Development Project Coordinator Dave Fogarty told commissioners that because of economic pressures coming principally from the dealership’s national offices, the city is at significant risk of losing four of the five.

Fogarty said that Weatherford BMW is on property owned by Berkeley Toyota, with a lease set to expire in four years. He said that Weatherford is “definitely pursuing an alternative site in Berkeley” and already has a potential property in mind.

He noted that the dealership is being wooed by Oakland, which is looking towards a possible relocation of its Broadway Auto Row to property that formerly formed part of the Oakland Army Base.

According to Fogarty, two of the remaining dealerships are in short-term leased space.

“They’re reluctant to invest in property that they don’t own or they can’t get a long-term lease on,” he said, and reported that the dealerships are under pressure to relocate to “more competitive locations” either inside or outside Berkeley, with the Volvo portion of the McKevitt dealership looking at moving to Emeryville.

One of those other auto dealers “is also pursuing property in West Berkeley, but it would be a leap of faith for them to do so without a change in zoning,” Fogarty said.

Only Toyota is likely to remain in Berkeley if the circumstances do not change, Fogarty said, with a probable move to its Ashby property once Weatherford BMW’s lease ends.

New auto sales are limited to restricted areas of Berkeley, with a staff reporter from Assistant City Planner Jordan Harrison noting that “few sites available in these areas suit the needs of dealerships.”

In addition, Harrison wrote that several of the available locations that were originally zoned for new auto sales “do not seem appropriate for auto uses today, as this large land use does not fit in well with the urban design or neighborhood context of these areas, particularly along Shattuck, Telegraph and University avenues.”

Planning staff suggested several possible zoning changes, but said it was too early in the process to make recommendations. Among the suggested possible zoning changes to entice auto dealerships to stay in Berkeley were:

• Allowing large auto dealerships in West Berkeley around each of the I-80 exits and as far east as 10th Street.

• Focusing the dealerships north of Virginia Street and mainly west of Third Street.

• Allowing dealerships in specific “overlay” districts along Frontage Road and Second Street and within close proximity to the Gilman and Ashby Avenue interchanges with I-80.

• Allowing dealerships within 2,000 feet of the Gilman and Ashby I-80 interchanges, but not near University Avenue or along Frontage Road or Second Street.›

Suppose they held an election in Berkeley, but no one showed up to open the polls?

That’s the situation the city was facing ten days ago, when Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi informed Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz that Berkeley was short 90 poll workers, and did not have enough staff to open three separate polling places. Muranishi listed the Westminster House, the YWCA Main Lounge, and the 515 Arlington Ave. polling places as the three in jeopardy.

Since that time, enough new workers have signed up that city precincts are now only about 10 short, and the three problem polling places are close to full staffs.

According to acting Alameda County Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold, “whatever people have been doing out there to get the word out about the staffing problems, it’s working.” She said that county employees were recruited, and Berkeley High School students, especially, were helpful in filling the unmet polling place needs.

Election workers are coordinated through the office of the county Registrar of Voters.

A spokesperson in the California Secretary of State’s office, Nghia Nguyen, said that their office had been requested to help recruit poll workers for three other counties in addition to Alameda: Santa Clara, San Diego, and Butte. Nguyen said that such requests for assistance are “normal” and are made by different counties throughout the state during every election, and she did not believe that the staffing problems were especially related to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special election.

The problem in getting poll workers, Alameda County’s Ginnold said, is “an extremely long day, a lot of responsibility, particularly for inspectors, and the pay is low.”

Polling clerks and judges are expected to work from 6 a.m. until the votes are secured. Inspectors have the additional responsibility of running the polling place, including setting up the machines and opening them up, supervising the other workers, and making sure the votes are transmitted to the central counting station and the voting machines secured.

Inspectors are paid $122.50 per election, while judges and clerks are paid $92.50.

Ginnold said that the county is looking into increasing the pay rate for the primary election scheduled for next June.

Next month’s election may—or may not—be the last in Alameda County using Diebold touchscreen machines. Those machines are operating under a state certification that expires at the end of the year. Voting machines used in any subsequent elections in California must operate with a verifiable paper trail, which the Alameda County Diebold machines do not possess. Ginnold said that Alameda County has already put out a Request For Proposal to election machine companies—including Diebold—for the new systems, with bids due in by Nov. 9.

Concerns over the Diebold touchscreens has already had an effect, in part, on the November special election in Berkeley.

Berkeley City Clerk Sara Cox said that because the county did not make paper ballots available for pre-election day voting at local precinct stations, the city would not exercise its option to conduct early voting at Berkeley City Hall as it has in previous years.

“There is concern within the city about the Diebold touch screen machines, which would have been the only early voting procedure available to us,” Cox said. “We’re encouraging people to vote by absentee ballot if they want to vote before election day.”

Cox said that in addition to the Diebold concerns, the city simply did not have the available staff to operate a pre-election polling place at City Hall. “We’d be pushed over the edge if we tried to do it,” she said.

Cox said that as in the past, Berkeley voters during the special election will have the option of using a paper ballot in lieu of the Diebold machines at Berkeley precincts on election day. In addition, she said that voters wishing to cast pre-election votes on paper ballots on-site are able to do so at the registrar’s office at the county courthouse in Oakland.?

Plans for a new transit station in Richmond took a big step forward this week.

Construction is scheduled to begin today (Friday) for the $6.4 million station building, which planners are promising will improve conditions for commuters while breathing new life into Richmond’s troubled ‘traditional’ downtown area.

The station will service riders of BART, Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor and AC Transit, and will serve as the linchpin of the city’s decade-long plan to spark economic growth downtown by transforming the area into a transit village.

Richmond city leaders, including Mayor Irma Anderson, said they were happy to see the plan progressing and were quick to point out the station’s importance to both the community and the region. Richmond station is the only Bay Area station linking all three of the region’s major transit services.

“I am so pleased to see the three major modes of mass transit that serve our community coming together as a regional transit hub,” said Anderson. “It brings these services together into one new, architecturally significant, station building.”

Ten years in the making, plans call for construction of the new station to last until November 2006, though project managers say the ongoing work won’t disrupt service for commuters.

When it’s complete, planners say the station will offer greatly improved pedestrian and handicapped access by adding a new elevator and reconfigured stairway. The station will also have plenty of natural lighting from its planned canopy roof, as well as enhanced waiting areas, an outdoor plaza and public art—including a large triptych mural by artists Daniel Galvez and Jos Sances.

The new, above-ground station will compliment two residential components of the transit village, and will expand the city’s Nevin pedestrian corridor along MacDonald Avenue to connect to Richmond’s Social Security office and Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, two frequent destinations for commuters.

The walkway will be elevated and enhanced with new lighting and greenery. Later phases of the project will bring commuter-friendly retail shops to the area, as well as a realtime message board inside the station’s waiting room. A pedestrian link to Richmond’s civic center is also in the works.

“We’re making enhancements to make it a focal point for pedestrian circulation, and a friendlier, more welcome place to be,” said Gary Hembree, chief of projects for the Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency, which has been overseeing development of the station.

Funding for the $110 million transit village project comes from a public-private partnership between a host of state and local agencies and the Olson company, which is developing much of the transit village’s residential component. Olson has already built Metro Walk, a 231-unit development to the west of the station, and will also construct an 800-space parking garage that will replace surface parking for commuters. An additional 300-plus residential units will be built to the east of the station as part of the project’s next phase.

The sum of Richmond’s current plans adds up to create one of the largest economic development projects there since World War II, when the city enjoyed growth and prosperity from its shipbuilding industry. The years since have been marked by decline, particularly noticeable in the city’s old downtown area where high unemployment and crime plague the neighborhood.

“The area is in desperate need of revitalization,” said Tom Butt, a Richmond city councilmember. “Having a multi-modal transit center right in the middle of downtown is the most important piece of putting this area back together.”

A 20-year-old Richmond resident died in a fatal traffic accident at the intersection of University and San Pablo avenues at 2:30 a.m. Thursday.

Dan Apperson, supervisor for the Alameda County Coroner’s Office, identified the woman as Christine Phan Dao, who worked as a clerk at Costco’s south Richmond warehouse store.

She is survived by her father, Tony Dao, also of Richmond, Apperson said.

Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Shira Warren said Dao was headed northbound on University Avenue at the time of the accident, and that the other driver was headed north on San Pablo Avenue when he struck Dao’s motorcycle.

Warren said the northbound motorist, whom she declined to identify, is in police custody at Highland Hospital, where he is being treated for injuries sustained in the crash.

He is suspected of being intoxicated at the time of the collision, she said.

Berkeley city councilmembers passed the second and final readings of the soft story and condominium ordinances Tuesday, as well as the city plan and zoning changes needed to construct the Gilman Street Playing Fields complex.

The condo and ballfields measures were adopted without discussion along with other items on the consent calendar, while the soft story measure generated considerable discussion.

The ordinance requires owners of buildings placed on a city register of structures with earthquake-vulnerable ground floors to submit engineering reports on their buildings and notify tenants and the public of their dangers.

As adopted, the measure doesn’t mandate seismic upgrades, something that may be added later after city officials and councilmembers have more time to ponder the issue.

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, the manager of a real estate firm, objected to a provision of the soft story ordinance that calls for recording notices of the structural vulnerabilities with the Alameda County Recorder’s Office, because the recording could lead insurers to cancel policies and lenders to call in loans.

Dan Lambert, senior management analyst for the Building and Safety Department, told Capitelli the recordings were included “to notify potential buyers that engineering work needs to be done on the buildings.”

“We looked at insurance companies and banks and they said they already look at these types of buildings already,” added Lambert, “and, is it a good thing or a bad thing if the price reflects seismic safety in this type of market?”

When it came time for the final vote, Capitelli abstained and the rest of the council voted their approval.

By-right housing additions

Proposed amendments to the city’s by-right housing addition law met a rockier course.

The original proposal by Councilmembers Wozniak and Betty Olds called for changes that would have allowed by-right additions by zoning certificates of up to 700 square feet for ground floor expansions, and required administrative use permits for all second-story additions, rather than allowing them by zoning certificates, as is currently the practice.

With Wozniak’s concurrence, Olds reduced the ground floor by-right addition to the current 500-square-feet limit.

But implementation proved far more complex, both because the changes would require amendments to all of the city’s current zoning districts and because the imposition of the use permit process would requirement an additional half- to three-quarters of a planning staffer’s daily time.

As a result, the proposal was remanded to staff for further study.

The council also:

• Authorized the addition of six Toyota Prius hybrid cars to the city’s vehicle fleet.

• Delayed acting on two opposing resolutions urging either the demolition or preservation of the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a decision that is in the hands of the U.S. Department of Energy.

• Approved the addition of a 977-square-foot three-car garage to a home at 1732-34 La Vereda Road, rejecting an appeal by neighbors of an earlier vote by the Zoning Adjustments Board.

• Approved expansion of the new credit card payable parking stations to the North Shattuck and Southside areas, and

• Granted a six-month lease on a building at Aquatic Park to Fix Our Ferals, which will use the structure for a sterilization program for free range wild cats to head off a sudden explosion of unwanted kittens in the springtime.

Fire Department savings

During the workshop session before the meeting, Fire Chief Debra Pryor informed councilmembers that her department’s flexible deployment plan, introduced as a cost savings measure in July, has saved the city about $200,000 while not causing any loss in response time for emergency calls.

The increases in overtime during the period were attributable to the firefighters who were called up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to participate in rescue and body search efforts in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita—$71,758 in overtime that Pryor said is slated for reimbursement by the feds.

“Do you think you can count on that, considering what’s happened with FEMA?” quipped Councilmember Betty Olds, drawing laughter from her colleagues.

The flexible deployment plan reduces staffing levels by one engine company per shift, temporarily reducing up to three positions per shift which would otherwise have to be filled by employees on overtime because of the current 10 vacancies in qualified firefighter positions.

Pryor said replacements have been hired for all the vacancies, but that they can’t go on active duty until they have completed all aspects of their training.

The plan was also helped by this season’s virtual lack of critical fire days. During the current fire season, which will end sometime next week, only one critical fire danger day was declared.

During a more general discussion on response times to fire calls, Councilmember Max Anderson asked what impact speed humps, traffic circles and other so-called calming devices have on response times.

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said each such device adds about 10 seconds to a call, so that a block with three speed humps might add a half-minute to response times needed to reach a property at the far end of a block.

Photograph by Jakob Schiller: Kelly English, 35, rests under a makeshift rain shelter he made in People’s Park during the rain showers on Tuesday. A graduate of Kennedy High in Richmond and of Diablo Valley College, he handed out his resume, which said, “I bring work and personal attributes that foster positive, respectful and peaceful relationships with my co-workers and customers. I want responsible employment with a team that also values these attributes.”

A pair of strong-arm bandits accosted an 18-year-old man was walking along the 2000 block of Shattuck Avenue at 1:25 a.m. Monday and robbed him of his iPod MP3 player.

Thorny theft

Person or persons unknown at a time unknown swiped a Thanksgiving cactus off the porch of a home in the 2000 block of Parker Street, according to the resident who discovered the goniff’s work Monday morning.

iJack 2.0

Another fellow discovered that someone had smashed a window of his car in the 2200 block of Dwight Way sometime before 9 a.m. Monday and absconded with his iPod and PDA, aka, personal data assistant.

Family fight

When police responded to a 911 call at 2:15 p.m. Monday, they arrived at a home in the 1200 block of 67th Street to find a mother and daughter both in need of medical attention.

While the details are unclear, it appears that pepper spray and an unknown hard object were involved after a mother/daughter spat escalated.

When the dust settled, it was the 17-year-old daughter who wound up being arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, brandishing a deadly weapon and battery, said Officer Warren.

Both parties received emergency room treatment.

Burglary tools

After officers stopped a 21-year-old Oakland man as he was walking in the 2500 block of Benvenue Avenue at 10:30 p.m. Monday, they discovered he was in possession of burglary tools and booked him accordingly.

Jewelry store smasher

Police arrested a 53-year-old fellow on suspicion of burglary after an alarm summoned them to Greer Jewelers at 2983 Sacramento St., where the fellow had smashed in a window and was scooping up jewelry on display.

As is the case with most jewelry merchants, the good stuff had already been locked away in a safe for the evening.¸

Mary Otani was born in Berkeley to hardworking immigrant parents from Okinawa. One of six children, she was a good student, and loved to play basketball. As a student at UC Berkeley, Mary was already interested in social justice, and worked with other YWCA students to support fair housing legislation.

When World War II broke out and Japanese Americans were expelled from their homes and sent to camps, Mary’s family stayed in a horse stall at Tanforan race track, then were sent to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. At camp there were no educational facilities for college students. A Quaker group, the Forum on Reconciliation, arranged for students to be placed in colleges away from the West Coast. Mary went to Boston University. There she met Bill, who was in the U.S. Army studying Japanese language at Harvard. They married before Bill went off to serve as a medic in Europe. In August, they celebrated their 61st anniversary.

Mary’s early interest in fair housing has been a lifelong concern. She worked in the office of the housing project where they lived to make sure the housing was racially integrated. She followed housing issues for years, most recently working on land trusts and renter’s rights.

Mary always put her family first. When her three children were young, she kept to their schedule by being the secretary to the elementary school principal. She organized volunteers in the school library, helped with PTA, Cub Scouts and Brownies. She worked for many years at the Consumer’s Cooperative grocery store’s Kiddie Corral, a unique service of quality child care while parents shopped. For years she arranged her schedule around fixing lunch every day for her elderly father.

Mary’s interest in the community extended to many areas. Whenever she saw a need, she found others who wanted to work on it and helped coordinate the effort to accomplish innovative solutions. At a time when the public schools did little to prepare students for world citizenship, Mary and others at the Unitarian Church organized a summer program that introduced children to the cultures of the world through positive experiences with language, food and customs.

Her involvement in the community touched many areas. She helped establish a senior center in Richmond Annex and supported saving land for parks in Richmond. For the League of Women Voters, she worked on many issues, monitoring the City Council and Port Commission. Each election, she worked on preparing the pros and cons stating the candidates’ positions on the issues.

Mary had a dedication to looking out for the well being of everyone, especially the less represented. When the U.S. government apologized to Japanese Americans who were interned and paid reparations, Mary and friends organized a scholarship fund with their money to provide scholarships to Southeast Asian immigrant students to help those who are the first in their families to go to college.

Cooperatives were another theme in Mary’s life that shows her belief in the power of people working together. She and Bill were early members of the Berkeley Coop grocery stores. (Bill even worked in the produce department for a short time.) Their children went to co-op pre-school and she organized a family cooperative swim group that rented the Albany pool and swam there for years. She worked on a co-op approach again with organizing a buying club for groceries, an effort to provide reasonably priced food to Richmond families that ultimately developed into the Richmond Farmer’s Market. Mary also served on a number of Richmond commissions and committees.

The Farmer’s Market represented Mary’s down to earth values. She believed in the power of people coming together to work for the common good. She was committed to improving everyone’s access to basic needs like food, shelter, education and health care. Lani Herrmann, a friend from the Farmer’s Market, has said that Mary was a kind of “glue” that quietly brought people together. Throughout her life she worked to build a community that was a better place for everyone.

Mary’s life will be celebrated Nov. 25 at 3 p.m. at Cragmont School Multipurpose Room, 830 Regal Road, Berkeley.

Do you ever not know what to do on a Friday or Saturday night? Do you feel like there is something going on you’re missing out on?

On Friday night and Saturday night, Berkeley High School’s (BHS) Drama Department will be presenting The Laramie Project. Under the direction of BHS Drama Teacher Jordan Winer, a group of Berkeley High students has produced a spectacular play originally created by the Tectonic Theater Project, Inc. from New York City.

Auditions for the cast began in May.

“To put it simply, I was looking for people who could quickly change characters,” said Winer, in his eighth year at BHS, the past five in the drama department. Around 50 kids showed enough interest in the play to try out, but not all made it. Many were scared at first to try out.

“Well, at first I didn’t really want to audition, because I was insecure about my acting abilities,” said sophomore Emily Fong, who made the cast. “But then I was like, ‘this is The Laramie Project. I have to be a part of it.’ It has so much potential to raise awareness of homophobia.”

Only 19 students were selected to be in the cast, while more than 30 were cut.

Winer told the cast that they needed to memorize most of their lines over the summer. When the kids came back in September, they were ready and they were pumped. Nearly all of the people who were in the play had been in a drama class before or had previous acting experience

For the first month, they practiced in small groups a few times during the week. At these times, they would talk about how to get into the mind of the character. For example, they would discuss how a gay person would act, or how a homophobic person would act. All these things were important for the person playing the character to get in the mindset of their character. During the second month, they started practicing as a whole group.

“It was pretty tricky [to practice as a larger group],” Winer said. “I thought that it was going to be just a bunch of monologues. But to make it dramatic, we had to be creative. It was harder than I had thought.”

This drama enfolds on the night of Oct. 6, 1998 in the rural town of Laramie, Wyo. Matthew Shepherd, a 21-year old gay college student, meets two men at the Fireside Bar. Later he is found by a bicyclist to have been severely beaten and abused, tied up, and left dead off a fence near a road.

This production focuses on the effects that the death of Shepherd had on the people of Laramie. The actors take on the persona of the people in the town of Laramie and it provides quite an insight into how life has changed.

When asked why an average Berkeley resident would want to see The Laramie Project, Winer responded, “Because it’s put on by high school kids who are really at a professional level of acting.”

“And it doesn’t just show one side of the story,” exclaimed Fong. “Someone had sent a letter to the superintendent saying that they had heard about The Laramie Project and thought that it was ‘anti-homophobic’ and ‘pro-gay’. But it shows so many different opinions of so many people, just like people in Berkeley. Anyone who comes to see this play can connect with someone.”

Cast members got a shock during preview week prior to the first performance. Between second and third period, someone had written “I Hate Fags” in the girls’ bathroom in big letters. The incident left many cast members in tears. However, they said the episode made them stronger.

“It just reminded me so much of why I am doing this play,” Fong said. “People can convince themselves that Berkeley is not homophobic and not sexist, but when you walk into the girls’ bathroom at Berkeley High School and see this, something is wrong, Despite all of that, it gave us so much more passion to do this play.”

The production débuted last Friday. It continues tonight (Friday) and tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Florence Schwimely Little Theater on Allston Way between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Milvia. Ticket are $6 for students and seniors and $12 for adults.

Latino journalists are disturbed by what they fear could be a new trend in the Hispanic media market: the outsourcing of ethnic media.

In California’s Silicon Valley, where high-tech industries have found they can produce the same product overseas for a fraction of the cost, one media company is following suit, shutting down its local Spanish-language paper and replacing it with a tabloid produced in Mexico.

The San Jose Mercury News announced Oct. 21 that it is closing its nine-year-old Spanish-language weekly Nuevo Mundo in order to cut costs. It is also selling its Vietnamese-language weekly Viet Mercury.

Knight Ridder, owner of the Mercury News, is replacing Nuevo Mundo with Fronteras de la Noticia, a weekly Mexican tabloid based in the city of León in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Produced by Mexico’s Danilo Black Company and sold by the United Press Syndicate, Fronteras is already being published by the nearby Contra Costa Times, another Knight Ridder paper.

Mexican newspapers may share cultural similarities with Spanish-language papers in the United States, but the needs of U.S. Latino readers are intrinsically different from the needs of those living in Mexico, says Jose Luis Benavides, journalism professor at California State University, Northridge and creator of the first Spanish-language journalism minor in the country. “They may speak the language but they don’t understand the context,” he says.

Ethnic media has a history of helping migrant communities to assimilate, says Benavides. “They tell readers where to get vaccinations for their kids and how to operate in this country,” he says, along with covering issues of concern to their communities, including immigration, education and health—all of which can only be covered by local reporters.

According to an employee of the San Jose Mercury News who did not wish to be named, the outsourcing of ethnic media represents “maquilajournalism,” and is akin to “a U.S. corporation killing off one of its own to bring in a foreign product.”

Replacing Nuevo Mundo with what he calls “a cookie-cutter, low-cost, factory-produced tabloid from Mexico” comes “at the cost of the quality of journalism and U.S. Latino journalists’ jobs,” he says.

Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism at USC Annenberg’s School for Communication, says Knight Ridder’s move to import a paper from Mexico is indicative of what’s going on in the industry as a whole. “Anytime you can produce for pesos and sell for dollars,” Gutierrez says, “you’re going to make money.”

Nuevo Mundo hired a local staff, but its entrance into the market nine years ago was nevertheless met with protest. Frank Andrade, publisher of the 27-year-old newspaper La Oferta, was part of a group that objected to the newspaper’s tactic of giving money and free ad space to nonprofit organizations like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and then asking them to sign an exclusivity contract with the paper.

Andrade was unable to prevent Nuevo Mundo from carrying out these business practices. But nine years later, La Oferta has a circulation of 103,000 and Nuevo Mundo, with a circulation of 57,000, is shutting down. Andrade was even asked if he wanted to buy Nuevo Mundo, an offer he turned down.

He says his newspaper outlasted Nuevo Mundo because La Oferta represents a more authentic voice. “We’re 100 percent Hispanic owned,” he says, “and we know the customs and traditions of Hispanics.”

Corporate interest in Spanish-language media is nothing new. “Our industry is vulnerable,” says Jonathan Sanchez, associate publisher and chief operating officer of Eastern Group Publications, an independent chain of bilingual newspapers in Southern California. “Mainstream corporations see the potential of the market and see an opportunity to make money,” he says.

“What’s new is that this time, we’re being approached by people from other countries,” says Sanchez, who says investors recently offered to buy his own newspaper and replace it with one produced in Latin America.

According to Sanchez, the main factor that determines why some ethnic media survive and others don’t is a lack of capital to compete with large corporate players. “In publishing, you have to run your paper as a business,” he says. “On the other hand, you have to be the voice of schools, the young, the elderly, etc. It’s a catch-22.”

On the other hand, corporations like Knight Ridder may understand the business model and outspend their poorer ethnic media counterparts, but lack the community component to attract and maintain a loyal readership.

“There’s a lot more to running a newspaper than publishing,” says Andrade. “You have to be a community leader.”

Andrade sees the outsourcing of ethnic media as a national trend: Fronteras already appears in 14 U.S. markets. But he isn’t worried.

“If [Fronteras] comes in the area and thinks it’s going to be a quick kill, they’re wrong. It’s not going to make a difference,” Andrade says. “In the newspaper business, there are no shortcuts. You have to earn every cent that you secure.”

Elena Shore is a writer for New California Media, an association of over 700 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media.

Unlike some ethnic enclaves, the Vietnamese-American community in Santa Clara county, does not lack for news in its own language. If anything, the community can access more news than a mainstream population reading in English only.

Three Vietnamese daily newspapers, half a dozen weeklies and several monthly magazines cater to a Vietnamese-American population of 125,000, not to mention radio and television programs and an array of websites. The largest of the weeklies, Viet Mercury, was owned by the San Jose Mercury News, which has a bureau in Hanoi and shared its content with its English daily, adding a wealth of original information, in a non-advocacy role, into the mix.

As one longtime Vietnamese reader in San Jose put it recently, “You read the Viet Merc and the San Jose Mercury News for information. You read community papers to know where the community stands on the issues and when to protest.”

That unique mix of editorial missions may be ending, however, as the San Jose Mercury News recently sold its Vietnamese-language weekly. Viet Mercury has reportedly been bought by Jim Nguyen, a former sales employee of the weekly who now heads a group of Vietnamese-American businessmen. Its last issue will be Nov. 11.

In an Oct. 21 press release announcing the sale, San Jose Mercury News Publisher George Riggs said that “buyers from the Vietnamese community” will “continue to serve the Vietnamese-reading community with the No.1-read publication in that language.” The Mercury News simultaneously announced the closure of its nine-year-old Spanish weekly Nuevo Mundo.

Publishing since 1999, Viet Mercury was distributed free and had a circulation of 35,000. It began with great promises in the heyday of dot-com money, and was in the eyes of many media observers a new kind of marriage between mainstream and ethnic press—one perceived to be lucrative, and a trend.

Back then it made sense. The majority of the Vietnamese-Americans in Silicon Valley are still first-generation immigrants. Though most are functional English speakers, many prefer to read in their own language. Many also have achieved financial success, owning real estate and small businesses.

“Santa Clara county's Vietnamese community is a major market, with an estimated buying power of 1.8 billion,” wrote the Mercury News in 1999 as it launched the Viet Mercury. “Growing in size and buying power, this is a valuable audience for any advertiser.”

That was before dot-com failures and before 9/11. After the high-tech bubble burst and the economy swooned, advertising revenue plummeted. Competition among ethnic media grew fiercer. While other Vietnamese-language newspapers were operating on the cheap, often out of small offices and with part-time employees, Viet Mercury had a large staff under high union rates. With those high production costs, it lost money.

Yet the weekly arguably had much higher professional standards than others in its field. One case in point was the story of Bich Cau Thi Tran, a Vietnamese woman shot dead in her own kitchen by a San Jose policeman on July 13, 2003, as she held a vegetable peeler that resembled a knife. From July 14, 2003, to August 30, 2003, the Mercury News ran 29 stories on the incident, and Viet Mercury published 16. Cali Today, a five-times-a-week paper, produced 12. Seven different reporters covered the Tran case for both the Mercury News and the Viet Mercury, three of whom were Vietnamese-Americans. None of the Vietnamese-owned papers could match such firepower and professional standards.

But such an operation became unsustainable when the economy worsened.

“With Americans, commerce is No. 1,” Nam Nguyen, editor and publisher of Cali Today, whose Vietnamese readership spans the Bay Area as well Sacramento, recently told the Orange County-based Nguoi Viet newspaper. “But with Vietnamese, even if you operate at a loss, you still try to run the paper because your community still needs a voice.”

In a sea of community-based newspapers, however, the Viet Mercury’s voice was unique, defining its role as providing “objective” information. It tended to cover stories “down the middle,” as De Tran, soon-to-be former publisher of the Viet Mercury, once explained. It left the role of advocacy to others.

Nguyen Qui Duc, host of “Pacific Time,” a syndicated weekly radio program on KQED in San Francisco, says he hopes the new owners of the Viet Mercury will maintain the objectivity and balanced reporting that the original owners cultivated. The new paper “can be an advocate of the community—which is the normal role of newspapers in ethnic or minority communities—but it need not abandon quality or fall into the trap of running only articles that don't raise eyebrows,” Duc says. The Vietnamese community, he says, has matured and will not support anything less.

Quynh Thi, executive editor of Vietnam Daily in San Jose, said that when Viet Mercury first launched she worried about competition, but soon found it operated in a different universe. “We're a daily, they’re a weekly. Our advertisers are also different, more community-based. Many of the Viet Merc's are big corporations.”

But she added that the community is very curious about the sale. “What everyone is talking about now is who are these investors? No one seems to have come forward,” she says.

One Vietnamese journalist in San Jose who would only speak anonymously repeated a growing rumor in the community: that “money from Vietnam is behind the sale.” In recent years, various Vietnamese citizens have bought businesses and real estate in California. Jim Nguyen, the journalist noted, had a hand in bringing San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh together as sister cities a few years back. Could he have brought Vietnamese money to the United States to buy media as well?

As of this writing, Jim Nguyen has agreed to a later interview to respond to all the rumors. The community, in the meantime, is watching closely the evolution of the weekly.

This is a response to Jill Posner’s letter claiming that the Sierra Club has made a deal with Magna/Caruso over development at the Albany Waterfront. I don’t know where Posner gets her information, but it is very, very wrong. The Sierra Club opposes the Magna/Caruso mall. It is completely contrary to the Sierra Club’s vision for the future Albany waterfront. If it is approved, we will lose our opportunity to get a real public shoreline with real public access for public use and enjoyment and we will keep the shoreline from becoming the private front yard to a huge shopping mall. Stopping the mall will also mean the chance for a real off leash dog park. If we stop the mall, we also stop Magna’s plans to build a race track and casino or “racino” as Magna’s CEO, Frank Stronach, likes to call his future vision for his race tracks. The track is on its last legs; it cannot survive without the mall and a casino operation. Once it goes, we can plan the future the way we want it, not the way Rick Caruso, a major George W. Bush financial contributor, wants for us. (Indeed, why should we help get him the profits to finance his support for the ultra-conservative agenda in the United States?)

The proposed Magna/Caruso Mall also threatens the economic vitality of Berkeley’s Fourth Street, Solano Avenue, and the El Cerrito Plaza. Just as a Walmart sucks the economic vitality of local business out of a community, so will this upscale Super Walmart Mall (a Caruso Super W). The Sierra Club urges all residents of the East Bay to oppose the Magna/Caruso Super W Mall.

Norman La Force

Chair, Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter

East Bay Public Lands Committee

•

LIES AND INTOLERANCE

Editors, Daily Planet:

Andrea Prichett writes a long commentary full of lies and racial intolerance. The tagline identifies her political affiliation with CopWatch. What Prichett fails to disclose is that she is employed as a writing teacher at the Alternative High School. One can only hope that she is not inciting the same hostility and lies in her classroom. But this being Berkeley, where rights and freedoms are often granted regardless of responsibility, I have concerns. I think the school district needs to remind her that this community values integration and tolerance.

I have been the chair of the neighborhood group for the past three years. Our meetings attract large diverse turnouts. There is no tension between residents as Prichett insinuates. The tension comes from our collective frustration at being the dumping grounds for the worst social problems, the lack of support from public officials, and the meddling of political opportunists like Stegman, Neumann, and Prichett.

Stegman, Neumann, and Prichett try to put blame anywhere but where it belongs. Outside of those still involved in the drug trade, I blame these alleged do-gooders, who have consistently disrupted the development of a viable community standard in Berkeley These political opportunists makes it their cause to promote contempt and disregard for decency and reasonable community standards.

Laura Menard

•

TEEN LIBRARIANS

Editors, Daily Planet:

I agree with Mark Bayless about the terrible tragedy of the loss of the teen librarians in the local neighborhood libraries where teens could easily drop in for help with finding books and learning about topics and how to write research papers and have kindly interesting young adults to talk to about their school experience and how they are learning and growing in the world. Now, thanks to the arrival of the current director, Jackie Griffin, we no longer have the teen librarians where the teens can easily go from their homes. Now, if a teen is in need of help after school they are left to themselves or have to find the money to go by bus or walk a long way or get a ride from someone to go to the main library for the few hours any teen librarian guides are available. Now, the chances of having individual attention in an ongoing way has been cut off for the youth of Berkeley. Now, at a time when they need and deserve more attention they are actually getting less than they had before the arrival of Jackie Griffin.

Part of the sad turn of events is that some of the librarians who were so wonderfully serving our youth have had to look for work in other counties so even if the hours were reopened in the local branches, the youth have lost their mentors forever. A silent tragic diminishment in the lives of many children in Berkeley. And no one knows. But, if we look at how the new director, Jackie Griffin, treated the adults of Berkeley, it may be realized that she was no more considerate of our rights or needs as human beings. She actually implemented the entire installment of the questionable radio identification devices in our library books, throwing out thousands of books into special dumpsters to reduce cost of device installation and all without ever asking us. She dismantled our trust the same way she dismantled the healthy thriving teen assistance programs serving the youth after school from the local neighborhood branches. Perhaps a time will come when we will vote for library director like we do for city auditor, mayor, and councilmembers. Someway the real needs we have in community deserve to be recognized and honored by the director.

Nancy Delaney

•

MARIN AVENUE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I do like the bike lanes on the new Marin Avenue.

Better yet, planting Sycamore Trees the entire length in the center of the avenue shall complete the design. I want a well designed, complete, elegant avenue. There are very few elegant avenues in the Bay Area. Sadly!

Richard Splenda

•

WINDFALL PROFIT

Editors, Daily Planet:

Today we were treated to the news that Exxon/Mobil and other oil companies are earning their highest profits ever in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In the meantime, the White House is attempting to cut Medicaid, privatize Social Security and reduce educational funding in order to make the tax cuts for the rich permanent, and pay for rebuilding New Orleans and an illegal war in Iraq. Oil company newspaper ads ask us to let them know if we see price gouging at the pump. I see price gouging all right, and it’s taking place at the top levels of corporate America and this government. How much privatization/piratization are we supposed to tolerate?

So how about our representatives in Washington getting off their duffs while waiting for the Libby/Rove perp walk and introducing a 100 percent corporate windfall profit tax? They might want to haul in a few oil executives and the vice-president for questioning while they’re at it. Despite what the lobbyists in DC tell them, their job description says they work for the people of this country, not the oil companies.

David Eifler

•

HURRICANE WILMA

Editors, Daily Planet:

I wrote a letter after Hurricane Katrina had decimated New Orleans and left the city under five feet of water about the majority of black residents stranded there without water, food and electricity for five days. I posed the question, what if it had been white folk who had to go through the same experience as the left-behind residents of New Orleans?

Lo and behold, in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, millions of Floridians are having trouble securing water, food, gas and have been without electricity for three days. Tempers are flaring and again the infrastructure for handling crisis has proved to be woefully inadequate.

Ron Lowe

Nevada City

•

UNION-BUSTING

Editors, Daily Planet:

Gov. Schwarzenegger made a big deal about his Screen Actors Guild membership in peddling his anti-labor ballot propositions during his grandstanding at the so-called Sacramento debate. He said: “I’m very proud to be a union member.” I, too, am a SAG member, of 15 years standing, and urge voters to reject the Terminator’s proposals which are injurious not only to my fellow workers in state employment, but by extension, to those of us in private industry, as well. SAG itself as a union opposes them. It seems that Arnie is following in the footsteps of two former SAG presidents, Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston, who also sold their souls for a mess of corporate pottage. But I’m sure the vast majority of SAG members will support the union’s stance in big business’s assault on the conditions of the working folks of California.

Harry Siitonen

•

BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

The Iraqi war is a meat grinder of the Bush administration’s own cynical making. They lied about WMDs to gain approval. Invading Iraq hasn’t captured Osama bin Laden, nor diminished Al Qaeda. On the contrary, more people have joined the insurgents to fight U.S. occupation. While we kill more Iraqis and lose more of our soldiers, grinding up more lives will not bring stability, nor peace, and certainly not democracy. Eventually, we will have to leave. Will it be soon, with 2,000 dead American sons and daughters, or later, when the body count is even greater?

Bruce Joffe

Piedmont

•

REPULSIVE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I wonder if other people, as I am, are so intensely repulsed by Bush, the man, and his speeches, that we cannot watch him on television. And thus, screaming in disgust, we turn him off and switch to another channel. Perhaps we should steel ourselves to the task of listening to Mr. Bush, no matter how high the gorge rises in our throats. I’m sure liberal Germans during the rise of the fuhrer turned off the radio in disgust and listened to Strauss waltzes to calm them down much to their detriment...as well as to the world’s detriment.

Robert Blau

•

TOWING HEARING

I am writing regarding a request to the Berkeley Police Department for a towing hearing which was made by phone this morning by Trevor Anthony Sherard. His car was taken on Sunday, Oct. 23 by Berkeley police for driving on a suspended license.

I completed paperwork for Mr. Sherard to file motion-to-dismiss documents with the Berkeley court to dismiss charges against Mr. Sherard. This would establish that Mr. Sherard had his license improperly suspended over a year ago and that his car was illegally impounded by the Berkeley Police Department. He was not notified by the court of the original license suspension which was sent to a different address from where he lived.

In addition, he was told by the officers who wrote up the charges and ticketed him, that impounding his car was “...no big deal—you’re just part of a quota, we have to get five cars today... it’s about money...”

How many cars per day is the Berkeley Police Department mandated to impound, and how many cars per day is each police officer required to impound? What revenue does this generate for the Berkeley Police Department per year? What other agencies share this revenue and what is their cut? What happens to officers who do not meet their quota? Did the fact that Mr. Sherard is a young African American male have anything to do with the police stopping him, since he was driving properly and obeying the speed limit?

Mr. Sherard was informed by the officers that he had three days to request a towing hearing, after which he would be charged a mandatory fee for 30 days of storage, and was given a phone number to call. He called the number this morning, got an answering machine in the Berkeley Police Department, where he left a message, and has had no response.

Why is it mandatory to pay 30 days of storage for an impounded car if it is not released at a towing hearing which must be requested within three days of the impoundment? What happens if the call is made within the three-day period but the Berkeley Police Department fails to respond?

In the wake of a United Nations investigation implicating a number of Syrian and Lebanese officials in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the Bush administration is calling for sanctions and leaking dark hints of war. But the United States is already unofficially at war with Syria. For the past six months, U.S. Army Rangers and the Special Operations Delta Force have been crossing the border into Syria, supposedly to “interdict” terrorists coming into Iraq. Several Syrian soldiers have been killed.

The analogy the administration is using for this invasion? Cambodia, which the Nixon administration accused of harboring North Vietnamese troops during the war in Southeast Asia. On April 30, 1970, American and South Vietnamese Army units stormed across the border, igniting one of the great disasters of all time. The invasion was not only a military debacle; it led to the rise of Pol Pot, who systematically butchered some two million Cambodians.

As in Vietnam, the American and British line in Iraq is that the war is fueled by foreign fanatics infiltrating from Syria and Iran. In an October talk to the National Endowment for Democracy, President George W. Bush told the audience that “Iran and Syria” have allied themselves with Islamic terrorist groups; he warned that the “United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them.”

According to the Financial Times, the Bush administration is already discussing who should replace Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with the White House leaning toward sponsoring an internal military coup. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley—the fellow who brought us the Niger-Iran uranium fairy tale—is in charge of the operation.

Flynt Leverett of the Brookings Institute says the cross border raids are aimed at encouraging the Syrian military to “dump” Assad. A military coup was how the United States helped put Saddam Hussein in power so he could liquidate the Iraqi Left.

The White House, in fact, knows that foreign fighters have very little to do with the insurgency in Iraq. The conservative London-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that the number of foreign fighters is “well below 10 percent, and may be closer to 4 or 6 percent.” American intelligence estimates that 95 percent of the insurgents are Iraqi.

The Bush administration has long had its sights on Iran, which Bush calls “The world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism.” These are sentiments recently echoed in London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair accused Teheran of smuggling weapons and explosives into Iraq to attack British troops in Basra. In one of history’s great irony challenged moments, Blair said “There is no justification for Iran or any country interfering in Iraq.”

The U.S. has been provocatively sending unmanned Predator aircraft into Iran, supposedly looking for nuclear weapons, but most likely mapping Iranian radar systems, information the United States would need before launching an attack.

A major player in all this is Israel, where the Likud and its U.S. supporters have lobbied for a U.S. attack on Iran and Syria. In a speech last May to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Richard Perle, a Likud advisor and former Bush official, said that the United States should attack Iran if it is “on the verge of [developing] a nuclear weapon.”

Vice-President Dick Cheney has even suggested that Israel might do the job. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the United States recently sold Tel Aviv 500 GBU-27 and 28 “bunker buster” guided bombs (although Syria would be a more likely target for such weapons).

Last month senior Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin admitted passing classified information on Iran to Israel through two AIPAC employees. Franklin used to work for former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and has close ties to neo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who says, “Tehran is a city just waiting for us.”

If all these names sound familiar it is because they brought us the war in Iraq. Would the U.S. (possibly allied with Britain and Israel) actually attack Iran and/or Syria?

Iran seems a stretch. The country has three times the population of Iraq, almost four times the land area, plus lots and lots of mountains you really don’t want to fight in.

Iran also has considerable international support, demonstrated two weeks ago when Europeans said they would not back U.S. efforts to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council for supposed violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

While a number of nations are nervous about Iran’s nuclear activities, the country is not seen as a regional threat. Its military budget is only one-third what it was in 1980. It also doesn’t hurt that Iran has the second largest oil reserves on the planet, reserves that Europe, China and India simply cannot do without

The Americans might bomb the hell out of the place but an invasion is doubtful, particularly given the current disarray of the U.S. military.

One caveat could alter that: the U.S. doctrines of preemptive war and first-use of nuclear weapons. Would the White House really push the button? Not out of the question.

According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, if it does come to war, Congress has no say in the matter. Asked if she agreed that the President would have to return to Congress in the case of military action against Syria and/or Iran, she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Oct. 19 that “the President retains those powers in the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq.”

Syria is the easier target. With the exception of its northern border, the country is a flat plain, less than half the size of Iraq and with a population of only 16.7 million. It is also reeling from the U.N. investigation.

This may make Syria look like fruit ripe for the picking, and an invasion would certainly divert attention from the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also be a logical extension of the Bush administration’s mythology that all our troubles in the Middle East are caused by foreign Islamic terrorists.

For the outcome of such a strategy see the war in Southeast Asia. Count up the dead.

• • •

Untold Iraq story of the month: freelance journalist and author Robert Dreyfuss’s revelation that Shiite militias are terrorizing secular Shiites and murdering Sunnis. While Shiites are also being killed and intimidated—in particular by the followers of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi—the militias responsible are not tied to, nor supported by, the British and Americans.

Dreyfuss, author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, says the situation has become so dire that it threatens to ignite a regional civil war that could draw in Iraq’s neighbors.

The issue boiled over into a nasty fight this month between Iraq and Saudi foreign ministers (with the former calling the latter a “Bedouin riding a camel”) that ended up pushing the Arab League into launching a mission to head off a civil war. Dreyfuss concludes: “…if the United States would get out of Iraq, give the Arab league a chance to manage things there, and take part in the Arab-led talks with the Sunnis, catastrophe might be averted.”

If things continue upon their present course—which “things” have that interesting habit of not always doing—somewhere in a school in North Oakland 50 years from now, a teacher will stand before a class and tell her (his) students the story of the day in 2003 when a courageous black woman, grown weary of the lies of the Bush administration, stood up by herself in the United States Congress and cast the single vote against the Iraq War Authorization, thus sparking a national movement that eventually led to both the collapse of neoconism as well as the end of the stranglehold of the radical religious right on the government of the country.

Fifty years from now I don’t plan on being anywhere near North Oakland—not that I don’t like North Oakland, I just have other plans for that time period—but some of you will almost certainly be around, and you will remember these days, and you will say patiently (but a little wearily, because you’ve grown tired of correcting this particular mistake) that yes, what Barbara Lee did was absolutely courageous and no, you don’t want to minimize it’s historical importance or how much it inspired people at the time, but she was, after all, only part of a greater thing going on in the Bay Area in opposition to Bush and the neocons and the war, and it is that thing going on of people and opinions and actions and accomplishments which must be studied and talked about if one is to understand the history of those (these) times.

But history loves the simple tale, if for nothing else in that it is so simple to tell.

And so, this week, upon the death of the dear Ms. Rosa Parks, we must suffer through the recitation of the story—once more—about the courageous little Alabama black woman who got tired one day coming from work and refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, thus on-and-on, you know the rest of the tale.

And at the risk of being accused of kicking dirt on the freshly dug grave of a beloved national and Civil Rights Movement icon, we are forced to say, once again, that no, that’s not exactly how it happened, and that it doesn’t take away anything from Rosa Parks to tell it right.

At the time of Ms. Parks’ historic act in the mid-1950s, there were a number of African-American organizations in Montgomery—some of them based in the black church, some of them with ties to the union movement, some of them based in the black business or educational establishments—that had long been working to end racial segregation in public accommodations in that city. Rosa Parks herself was secretary of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had membership from all of those factions.

As the story is told by those who were there at the time, in refusing to give up her seat, Ms. Parks actually repeated an action that had been taken several weeks before by another young black woman. Black Montgomery leaders briefly considered making that earlier action a test case, but decided against it when they learned that the young woman had a child out of wedlock. Afraid that Montgomery’s white segregationist establishment would pound on that single fact—“niggers dropping babies without fathers”—to turn local and national attention away from the issue of segregation, the black leaders searched around for someone who could not be attacked on such “moral” grounds. Rosa Parks was chosen, and the refuse-to-give-up-her-seat-on-the-bus incident was restaged so that she could be arrested, and the black bus boycott instituted as a “spontaneous” response of outrage.

Personally, I think that either action—the spontaneous one of the earlier black woman as well as Ms. Parks’ planned demonstration—took equal courage in Montgomery in the mid-1950s, but that’s just me.

And it is also interesting to see how little things have changed in human nature in the past 50 years. In the mid-1950s, just as it is today in 2005, it was easy to get people distracted from issues, muddying the waters with one moral issue—having a child out of wedlock—in order to cover up another one—oppressing a group of people because of their race.

In any event, Rosa Parks herself tended to both resist her own deification and to try to tell the truth about what really happened in the months leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott. I got the chance to interview her by telephone some years ago, and she confessed that months before she refused to give up her seat, she was “very nervous, very troubled in my mind about the events that were occurring in Montgomery.”

At that time, the summer of 1955, she was attending civil rights training workshops at a long-time labor and radical movement center called Highlander in Tennessee. One of her trainers was a woman named Septima Clark of Charleston, a giant in the Civil Rights Movement, but someone you’ve probably heard little or nothing about. “I had the chance to work with Septima” at Highlander, Ms. Parks told me. “She was such a calm and dedicated person in the midst of all that danger. I thought, ‘If I could only catch some of her spirit.’ I wanted to have the courage to accomplish the kinds of things that she had been doing for years.”

Septima Clark was certainly someone to look up to. She had joined the NAACP in 1919—only a few months after it was formed—and worked in its initial campaign to end lynchings in the Deep South. As frightening as Montgomery in 1955 seems to us now—with its white terrorist bombings and racial murders and police attack dogs—South Carolina in the 1920s was a hundred times more dangerous for civil rights and Black Freedom advocates.

But just like Ms. Parks, Septima Clark always minimized her own accomplishments, giving credit to the people who had come before her in even more dangerous times. The black Reconstruction-era officeholders, for example, who faced assassination in the reign of terror that came after union troops were pulled out of the South in the 1870s, the time of the original formation of the Ku Klux Klan by former Confederate officers and soldiers. Or, earlier than that, the Charleston Sea Island black folk—the people known as the Gullah—who had seized plantation lands from slavemasters in the midst of the Civil War, received General William Sherman’s promise that they could keep it (the famous “40 acres and two mules Special Field Order”), and later refused to give it up even after the United States Congress said that the former Confederates should have their land back. These were the people Septima Clark looked to for stories of courage and inspiration.

Looking at Rosa Parks, therefore, we don’t see as much a “beginning”—a single spark lighting a prairie fire, to use Mao tse Tung’s famous phrase often-quoted by ‘60s-era radicals—as we do a “continuation,” a string of history running backwards and forwards through the momentous events of Montgomery, 1955, with courageous people rising to meet the challenges at different points, some of them well-known, some of them anonymous and lost to the history books.

With Rosa Parks’ passing this week, therefore, we don’t see the end of the story. It’s only the turning of a page, and the moving on to another chapter. 50 years from now, I hope that’s the story that gets told.

I’m sitting here Tuesday night in my South Berkeley home contemplating Andrea Pritchett’s venomous Oct. 25 commentary, “No Simple Solutions for Berkeley’s Drug Problems,” when six gunshots ring out close by. I instantly call 911 and report the number of shots, and estimate direction and distance. The scariest part about it was that this is a completely ordinary part of life here—counting the shots and praying they don’t come in your window.

One of my neighbors told me the other night that when she plays with her kid at our local playground, she always keeps him near the low cement wall, because if shooting starts she wants to be able to grab him and use the wall for cover. Another drills her kid in hitting the floor when the shooting starts. My own 2-year old recently brought me a hypodermic needle someone had tossed into our backyard, asking what it was.

I am the lead plaintiff for the group of 14 South Berkeley neighbors—white and black--who are suing Lenora Moore in small claims court for allowing her home at 1610 Oregon St. to serve as a drug supermarket. Many others would have joined, but were too frightened to do so. Why? At the successful conclusion of a similar neighborhood suit in 1992, a firebomb was thrown at the house of its lead plaintiff. The intended message from the drug thugs was sent and received.

We haven’t even concluded this case yet, but already Moore’s supporters are tossing around the equally incendiary charge of racism. Leo Stegman, Moore’s legal advisor from the East Bay Community Law Center, checks out the skin color of everyone in the court (Commentary, Oct. 21) and concludes that because there’s more melanin on one side than the other that racism must be involved. In her commentary, Pritchett writes that “Newly arrived white neighbors are often offended by the conditions they find in these neighborhoods.” I’ve got news for you, Andrea: It’s not just the white folks. There are many African-American families in South Berkeley, both newcomers and old-timers, who are doing their best to give their kids an alternative to the thug life. There are also plenty of Japanese- and Chinese- and Tibetan- and Yemeni-Americans who are offended by the gunplay and drug dealing as well. We’ve been working together for years to try to make this a better neighborhood and a safe place for kids to grow up. Pritchett and Stegman’s aim is to use race to divide us, for which they ought to be deeply ashamed.

Pritchett has never spoken to us, never come to our well-attended neighborhood meetings, never helped pick up the liquor bottles and used condoms and crack baggies. She was not present at our first court hearing, and apparently has not read the very large volume of evidence we presented to the court and to Ms. Moore. She writes, for example, that “the neighborhood group bases much of its analysis on observations made from afar and based on hearsay and generalizations.” My wife and I live next door, and have watched eight years of drug transactions at 1610 while Lenora Moore placidly comes and goes, studiously oblivious to the dealing around her. All of the plaintiffs, in fact, lived within two blocks during the period covered by the suit, and most still do. In our suit, we cite a long history of specific incidents of dealing directly connected to 1610 Oregon, backed up by a very extensive record of arrests and calls for service from the Berkeley Police Department.

Even Pritchett has to admit the inconvenient fact of the October 2004 raid that found cocaine, heroin, and a semi-automatic handgun in the house. Yet she and other defenders portray Ms. Moore as a perpetual hapless bystander. By their account she is to be held responsible for good works in the community, yet has no responsibility whatsoever for the criminal activities that take place at the house she owns. Yes, she did take out temporary restraining orders on six family members—but only after we filed our suit. Moore’s defenders try to present these orders both as evidence of her determination to do something about the problem and as some kind of proof that she is the victim of elder abuse. Contrary to what Osha Neumann claims, no court has ever ruled that she is the victim of such abuse, and she has presented no evidence of any abuse in court.

Ms. Moore’s negligence enables the drug trade in our part of South Berkeley. Berkeley police officers testified in court that her home is a “safe house” for local dealers, who are free to come and go. Even after she was under a supposed stay-away order, Moore’s adult daughter was dealing down the street at Oregon and California, and sending back up to 1610 for a bowl of gumbo—“with extra crab.” A 15 year-old grandson who is under her guardianship also deals at the corner, and also gets meals delivered to him from 1610. By her own admission, Moore has never tried to enforce any of the restraining orders. Instead, she has turned a blind eye to the criminal activities of her children, grandchildren, and their many associates. Now we’re in court asking her to take responsibility.

One final point: Moore’s defenders keep talking as though going to court were the neighbors’ first recourse. It was not. We worked with the city and the Police Department for six years to try to find a solution, including bringing in Adult Protective Services, whose services Ms. Moore rejected. We went to mediation with her at East Bay Community Mediation, but failed to reach an agreement. Just this week we offered to try mediation again, but were rebuffed. We have literally tried everything we can think of to remedy a very long-running and ugly situation. Going to court was truly our last resort.

Where, on the other hand, have Moore’s defenders been all these years? They’ve never come to our neighborhood meetings, never come forward to help this supposedly helpless woman chase away the dealers from her property. They only show up now to smear good people as racists for standing up to the drug thugs who control our streets. Into a community already poisoned by crack and heroin they’re trying to inject racial division. Makes a firebomb look kind of benign by comparison.

Paul Rauber is an editor at Sierra Magazine and a former columnist for East Bay Express.

Secrecy has been perhaps the most consistent trait of the George W. Bush presidency. Whether it involves refusing to provide the names of oil executives who advised Vice President Dick Cheney on energy policy, prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, or forbidding the release of files pertaining to Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure in the Justice Department, President Bush seems determined to control what the public is permitted to know. And he has been spectacularly effective, making Richard Nixon look almost transparent.

But perhaps the most egregious example occurred on Nov. 1, 2001, when President Bush signed Executive Order 13233, under which a former president’s private papers can be released only with the approval of both that former president (or his heirs) and the current one.

Before that executive order, the National Archives had controlled the release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which stipulated that all papers, except those pertaining to national security, had to be made available 12 years after a president left office.

Now, however, Mr. Bush can prevent the public from knowing not only what he did in office, but what Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did in the name of democracy. (Although Mr. Reagan’s term ended more than 12 years before the executive order, the Bush administration had filed paperwork in early 2001 to stop the clock, and thus his papers fall under it.)

Bill Clinton publicly objected to the executive order, saying he wanted all his papers open. Yet the Bush administration has nonetheless denied access to documents surrounding the 177 pardons President Clinton granted in the last days of his presidency. Coming without explanation, this action raised questions and fueled conspiracy theories: Is there something to hide? Is there more to know about the controversial pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich? Is there a quid pro quo between Bill Clinton and the Bushes? Is the current president laying a secrecy precedent for pardons he intends to grant?

The administration’s effort to grandfather the Reagan papers under the act also raised a red flag. President Bush’s signature stopped the National Archives from a planned release of documents from the Reagan era, some of which might have shed light on the Iran-contra scandal and illuminated the role played by the vice president at the time, George H. W. Bush.

What can be done to bring this information to light? Because executive orders are not acts of Congress, they can be overturned by future commanders in chief. But this is a lot to ask of presidents given the free pass handed them by Mr. Bush. (And it could put a President Hillary Clinton in a bind when it came to her own husband’s papers.)

Other efforts to rectify the situation are equally problematic. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, has repeatedly introduced legislation to overturn Mr. Bush’s executive order, but the chances of a Republican Congress defying a Republican president are slim.

There is also a lawsuit by the American Historical Association and other academic and archival groups before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. A successful verdict could force the National Archives to ignore the executive order and begin making public records from the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.

Unless one of these efforts succeeds, George W. Bush and his father can see to it that their administrations pass into history without examination. Their rationales for waging wars in the Middle East will go unchallenged. There will be no chance to weigh the arguments that led the administration to condone torture by our armed forces. The problems of federal agencies entrusted with public welfare during times of national disaster—9/11 and Hurricane Katrina—will be unaddressed. Details on no-bid contracts awarded to politically connected corporations like Halliburton will escape scrutiny, as will the president’s role in Environmental Protection Agency’s policies on water and air polluters.

This is about much more than the desires of historians and biographers—the best interests of the nation are at stake. As the American Political Science Association, one plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, put it: “The only way we can improve the operation of government, enhance the accountability of decision-makers and ultimately help maintain public trust in government is for people to understand how it worked in the past.”

Kitty Kelley is the author of The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.

The City of Berkeley projects budget deficits into 2007. Some argue that these deficits are due to excessive compensation received by city workers. While workers certainly receive fair compensation for their work, this compensation is not the source of the problem and is far from excessive.

Salaries, for example, afford workers a decent standard of living. But given the immense wealth in California, workers’ salaries are hardly excessive. California’s economy is the fifth largest in the world, but wealth is distributed mainly to the richest in the state. There are approximately 350,000 California households with a net worth of more than $1 million. Corporate executives in California typically earn up to 400 times as much as their average employee and those working for large corporations are compensated at an average rate of more than $12 million annually. Take the case of Disney’s Michael Eisner who, despite earning close to $100 million annually throughout the 1990s, awarded himself an historic $565 million stock option payday in 1997.

Turning to healthcare, the city pays the cost of health insurance premiums for workers and their dependents. And while the cost of insurance premiums is certainly fueling the city’s deficit, worker demands for affordable health insurance are not the problem. Instead, it is the skyrocketing cost of health insurance that makes it increasingly difficult for employers, such as the City of Berkeley, to provide workers with affordable healthcare.

Since 1999, premiums paid to health insurers in the U.S. have risen, on average, more than 10 percent each year. And while access to affordable healthcare is prohibitive for millions of Americans due to spiraling costs, profits for health insurance companies are the highest they’ve been since the early 1990s. Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which covers one of every three people with health insurance in the U.S., doubled its profits in 2003 with premium increases ranging from 10 to 16 percent.

With respect to retirement, the city pays into CALPERS (California Public Employees Retirement System) for workers. CALPERS is the last of a dying breed: a retirement system that guarantees a pension, or defined benefit.

CALPERS has come under fire at the local and state levels. In Berkeley, BASTA argues that workers, instead of the city, should pay into CALPERS. What BASTA doesn’t mention is that the city began paying into CALPERS only after workers agreed to forgo one time salary increases.

At the state level, our governor suggests that the costs associated with CALPERS are too much for the state to bear, and that workers with public pensions are a greedy special interest group. Is it greedy for workers to demand a secure retirement? Or is greed that which compels the governor to privatize public pensions so that he can line the pockets of his allies on Wall Street, even if such a move could threaten the retirement security of working people across the state? Furthermore, the governor’s pension privatization plan would likely cost California taxpayers more money, despite his claims to the contrary.

Additionally, the city’s deficits are due, in part, to government policies that have resulted in deep cuts to federal and state funding that municipalities depend on.

The cost of the Iraq war has now reached more than $200 billion. This reckless spending has meant ballooning federal deficits and President Bush has used these deficits to slash funding that goes to the states for programs that serve low income children and families, the elderly, and the disabled. It is estimated that the war has cost California $26.2 billion.

And while Bush pours more and more money into the war, he is bankrupting the country further by cutting taxes for the richest Americans. Bush’s latest round of tax cuts will give millionaires a raise that amounts to approximately 13.5 percent of their income (compared to about 1 percent for the majority of Americans). In addition, corporate taxes are at their lowest level in 20 years. Nearly 95 percent of U.S. corporations now pay less than 5 percent of their income in taxes. This despite a corporate tax rate that officially stands at 35 percent.

To make matters worse, our governor, facing sharp cuts in federal funds, vows to balance the budget wholly on the backs of the poor and working class Californians (by cutting services) while leaving in place a regressive tax structure in which the poor pay 12 percent of their income in state taxes while the wealthiest Californians pay 7 percent. And with California’s deficit surging, the governor has taken monies away from Cities and Counties across the state. According to the California State Association of Counties, California’s cities and counties agreed to give back a combined $2.6 billion to help the governor address the state’s budget deficit. Cities across California, including Berkeley, will likely face more of the same: sharp decreases in state funding and a shifting of local revenues from cities and counties to the state.

While much of the responsibility for local budget problems rests squarely on the shoulders of Bush, Schwarzenegger and their corporate backers, there is still the matter of Berkeley’s budget deficit. So what is to be done? We can begin with a few basic assumptions.

First, all working people are deserving of a decent wage, affordable healthcare, and a secure retirement. Secondly, the city’s deficits are due, in large part, to a health care system that values profit over people; to the war on and occupation of Iraq; to a regressive tax system; and to state and federal policy makers who insist that budgets are best balanced by cutting services for the poor, as opposed to taxing the rich. It behooves all of us to focus on the true source of the problem. In this way, we might wake up one day to find that everyone has access to quality affordable healthcare, that our tax dollars go toward human needs instead of war, and that the burden of taxation does not fall most heavily on those who are least able to afford it. In short, we might just wake up to a better world.

Michael Marchant is a social worker and union member living in Albany.

Concerning Antonio Rossman’s remarks in the Oct. 7 Daily Planet, I would like to make several comments. Rossman says the following: “In the court’s words, ‘It therefore appears compelling that the statutory allowance for settlements in closed session not override extrinsic requirements for public proceedings.’ In lay terms and common sense: more important than settling city litigation is the right of citizens to learn in advance and influence the settlement terms.”

Sorry, in lay terms, this part of the ruling eludes common sense. The court said, at the very beginning of its discussion: “First, the S.A. [Settlement Agreement] is intrinsically invalid because it includes commitments to take or refrain from taking regulatory actions regarding the zoning of Trancas’s development project, which may not lawfully be undertaken by contract. Secondly, the S.A. is also invalid as a municipal act because its adoption in closed council session violated the Brown Act. Because of this invalidity, the association’s further contentions under CEQA and the Map Act are moot.”

Just following the passage Rossman quoted from the ruling is the following: “This would mean that a settlement approved in closed session could not include agreement to take government action that independently required a public hearing….” Now this is entirely moot and actually nonsensical, because the city could not take that action in an open session meeting, either, for the first reason given at the beginning of the court’s discussion. Requirements for future public hearings and all other such requirements cannot be contracted away, period. Individuals interested in wheeling and dealing should join the private sector and get the hell out of local politics.

The Brown Act has nothing at all to do with the holding in this case, and this court does not do justice to the Brown Act issues. The premise is wrong —there is no “statutory allowance for settlements in closed session,” at least not under such circumstances as occurred in the LRDP lawsuit. The final approval, of course, may be held in closed session because that requires weighing and assessment of the settlement offer and not just the mere reporting of it. Legal analysis may always be discrete, but the mere reporting of the offers and negotiations must always be done in open session. That is the law.

Mind you, the effect of this ruling was only to invalidate the settlement agreement. The logic of this ruling might invalidate the settlement agreement in the LRDP lawsuit here in Berkeley, but it would not allow the setting aside of the voluntary dismissal or the reopening of the case challenging the LRDP. It is true that a notice of settlement presages a dismissal, but a voluntary dismissal is not contingent upon the settlement. The dismissal would stand with or without a settlement. Upon the invalidation of the settlement agreement, the LRDP would still stand, and the citizens, having won the battle, would still have lost the war.

My motion and appellate petitions are the only way to win the war. My petition for review was just denied by the California Supreme Court. Now the preliminaries are out of the way and I can begin my real mission: appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. I expected a biased court in California— it only stands to reason—a single citizen taking on two of the largest behemoths in the state will not do well within that state, unless the judiciary is of sterling character, which was apparently not the case.

Moreover, I feel that it was not so much me or my arguments that were shut out, but God Himself, or Truth Itself. These justices heard the ring of truth and did not like the sensation—that was the major problem, in my opinion. Pardoxically, I may get a better result from the Roberts court, if indeed he is as open to God as he claims. We obviously disagree on the political implications of religious belief, but the mere openness to God or Truth may actually be there and facilitate their ability to actually hear the motion. He that hath ears let him hear.

With respect to Rossman’s admonition that “Berkeley should now suspend all action to implement the settlement with UC pending finality of the Malibu case,” of course he is right, except insofar as the objectionable clauses may be severable. The failure to do as Rossman suggests will point once again to the complete disingenuousness of our city government when it comes to legal issues. Recall how they jumped to revoke the ban on TIC’s in response to a mere trial court ruling in San Francisco, which did not set precedent and was entirely distinguishable from the comparable situation here in Berkeley.

With cellphones off and no chance to call 911, the audience faces the ground floor interior of an old wood house in Seattle, strewn with packing boxes, the bannister of a staircase turning up and away from the tableaux of figures facing each other at the doorway, one in bright daylight, the next in darkness, as the grandfather clock tolls the hour.

The play of Finn in the Underworld begins on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage with quick alternation: light and dark, female and male pairs, reunion and first meeting.

Two middle-aged sisters, Rhonda (Randy Danson) and Gwen (Lorrie Holt), reunite querulously over packing up the remnants of life in their family’s house, coming back together in their home town after their mother’s move to a retirement home to close up the old place for sale.

Meanwhile—or meantime? The times are staggered—Gwen’s 20-something son Finn (Clifton Guterman) is following up a chance meeting with a tryst with an old neighbor and friend of the family, Carver (Reed Birney). Later it will turn into a homoerotic makeout session as a bare lightbulb swings from the ceiling of a cellar room-cum-bomb shelter where “people just don’t go.” It is a place where many sexual games have been played over the years, from Carver playing “doctor” with Finn’s aunt Rhoda to more deadly secret “fun.”

The two parallel lines of telling the story converge, break apart again and reconverge, going over the same ground. There are many repetitions, deadly hints that seem to become explicit, then ambiguous again. In the balance hangs the fate of Carver’s brother, of Carver himself, the role of Finn’s grandfather in their fate, what Rhode and Gwen knew or saw and how it made them what they all have become. The inference and implications strain the edges of the story. The canvas doesn’t broaden, but bends, folds, turning inward. The house itself seems to swallow up the family with its secrets, like a cannibal parent devouring its progeny.

The Rep offers up this Halloween treat more like a trick, with a parental advisory over the heavy petting and hints at the joys of asphyxiation. It’s a socio-psychological spook show, with back-and-forth role playing by the cast (who perform it well, especially Randy Danson). It is a kind of psychodrama/mock lecture on the aura of fear in the days of bomb shelters and “normal” nuclear families.

Playwright Jordan Harrison has remarked that the film The Haunting (by Robert Wise, who died last month) was an influence on his characterization of the house, and that the crazy non-Euclidean geometry of storylines that converge in the second part owes something to his teacher, playwright Paula Vogel and her maxim “that each play should fall apart in pursuit of its aesthetic goal. That there’s a place in each play where once the audience learns the rules, you should start to twist them a little bit.”

This seems to be in the great tradition of horror, always an erotic medium (as the word “nightmare” has come to imply). Personifications of houses, their identity with family secrets, go back to the allegories of the Middle Ages, surface again in the Baroque and in the gothic tale, as modernized (and burlesqued) by Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” most famously—or, awful with incest and black humor, “Berenice”).

There’s a whole strain of American theater and film dedicated to the haunted house, such as George M. Cohan’s Seven Keys to Baldpate and Roland Young’s remarkable film The Bat Whispers, whose success and moody style and techniques were snapped up by the horror and suspense genre, like Tod Browning’s Dracula and Mark of the Vampire and Hitchcock’s atmospherics.

But these old potboilers had a hidden sophistication in their theatricality. They could send up their own melodrama knowingly, use the very double standard that provided the dilemmas for their shockers and cliffhangers to make a kind of irony of middle class morality. There’s a good reason why Surrealists pirated gothic kitsch. Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, where a corrupt bunch of bourgeois seem unable to quit the house of their reveling, is an artistic triumph of an old trouper’s method for squeezing an old plot for juice, blood from a stone.

Finn in the Underworld remains more intriguing than frightening or revelatory. It identifies and comments on the problem rather than playing it. There’s something a little academic in its fooling around with storytelling conventions; the horror gets swallowed up by them rather than conveyed.

Jordan Harrison has a dowser’s instinct for where that horror is, but there is more poignancy in his comment that “before it takes a turn for the worse, it’s a weird love story—or a last-ditch attempt for connection, at least,” than what the play itself can muster. Something’s off in the emphasis, as in the accent, when he remarks, “I want to make people scared of the dark.”

Contributed photo

Lorri Holt, Randy Danson, Clifton Guterman and Reed Birney in the world premiere of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.a

“We’re cooking live on-stage, every performance,” said director Clive Chafer of TheatreFIRST’s Northern California premiere of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, opening tonight (Friday) at the Jewish Community Center.

The play, on a tour of three small Bay Area stages, features eight actors playing 40 characters, handling 125 props, 45 of which are edible.

“It’s one of our postage stamp epics,” Chafer said, “showing food to be what transcends all divisions of religion, culture, ethnicity and nationality in Israel and the occupied territories.”

The play began in London a few years ago when writer Robin Soanes was commissioned by the non-profit Caird Co. to construct a play about everyday life in Israel/Palestine in the style that’s become known as “verbatim theater.” After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Soans traveled to the area with two stage directors—one Jewish, the other Arab—returning with over 100 interviews.

“He interviewed everybody, from transvestite prostitutes in the street, to falafel shop owners whose buildings had been blown up, to transplants from New York City to Jerusalem, getting all of them to talk about food while cooking or eating,” Chafer said, “It’s a patchwork of stories in 25 scenes, some characters recurring—part cooking demo, part docu-drama, part report from the front lines.”

Chafer said some characters have direct experience with suicide bombings, but others have a more indirect relationship to the violence.

“One transplant starts eating at a chain of fast food stands that suffered bombings, saying if customers don’t come, the bombers will win,” he said. “It’s about what it’s like to live in an undeclared war zone.”

Soans’ first rule of playwrighting is: don’t try to make it a political play. The details of everyday life are what reveal the truth of the situation.

“Israel and the occupied territories are a melting pot, not so different from the U.S.A.,” Chafer said. “There’s great diversity; one character’s a Greek Orthodox Arab married to a priest at the Church of the Nativity. All have common ground in the passion for, and delight in, the food of the Eastern Mediterranean, which all eat, but each prepares differently.”

TheatreFIRST seeks to bring plays dealing with important international issues to Bay Area audiences. Chafer said the company had developed a series of plays about identity—racial, ethnic, religious—and conflict.”

The company has recently produced a play about Indian immigrants to America, one about a Latino who lives in North American traveling in Latin America and David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, about his trip to Israel/Palestine where he met with various newsmakers.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook can be seen as a sister play of sorts to that work, Chafer said, “but one that draws out strands in common from everyday life that will become threads in the fabric of peace.”

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook will follow the same path of Via Dolorosa, from the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center, then to Old Oakland Theater on Ninth Street near Broadway, and finally to the Traveling Jewish Theater in San Francisco.

Chafer said he was excited about the new Oakland venue. “In our swank new location, in a beautiful row of Victorians in Old Oakland, we couldn’t be better placed. There are at least seven restaurants and two places to have a drink right by the theater. And there’s free parking in a lot a block away.”

Show times: 8 p.m. Thursday–Saturday; 3 p.m. Sundays. There will be no Friday performances at the BRJCC (Oct. 28 and Nov. 4), and BRJCC’s Nov. 6 show will be held at 7 p.m. rather than 3. Tickets: $1-$22. Half-price for those under 25 years of age. $3 discount for seniors, students and members. Pay what you can on Nov. 3. For more information, call 436-5085, or see theatrefirst.com.

Midnite, reggae from St. Croix, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25-$27. 548-1159.

Guru Garage, jazz funk, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277.

Clifford Brown 75th Birthday Celebration Trumpet Summit with Arturo Sandoval, Benny Golson, Randy Brecker and many more at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $18-$30. 238-9200.

SATURDAY, OCT. 29

CHILDREN

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Betsy Rose, music for the fall season, at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568.

The Unofficial Histories of Péter Forgács “The Maelstrom” at 5:30 p.m. and Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan at 7:30 at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

READINGS AND LECTURES

Ernesto Cardenal, poetry and conversation with the former Minister of Culture of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua at 6:30 p.m. at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 849-8232.

“The American Self in Film” with David Thomson and Mike Katovich at 7:30 p.m. at College Prep School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 339-7726. www.college-prep.org/livetalk

If you are one of those damned souls who has traveled “the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,” the well-worn path from lisping your ABCs, to juvenile reader, to adolescent bookworm, to adult bibliophile, and finally to full-blown bibliomaniac, then you know that “of making many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

You begin with a Penguin paperback Hamlet for English 101, and quickly decide you should have the Bard’s complete works in the Riverside edition. Soon you must have the Applause facsimile of the First Folio and then you hit the brick wall of knowing that the closest you will ever come to one of the 240 or so extant copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio is viewing two pages of it through the glass pane of a vitrine. Now there is an answer to your problem without resort to theft or psychoanalysis.

When John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems, hit that wall, he decided to turn some of his rare tomes, as well as others from such venerable institutions as the British Library, Library of Congress, and Folger Library, into CD and DVD-ROMs so that the common reader could almost touch some of the world’s rarest, most beautiful and most significant books.

These discs make it possible to examine and magnify in minute detail not just text and illustrations, but even the paper, watermarks and binding. Although for now we still see through a glass, it is no longer darkly. It is as if someone, our computer genie, were willing to take an infinite amount of time to display every detail of a treasured object, its hand-tooled leather bindings, translucent watercolors, the very texture of the paper. There is none of that greying out of the page that you find in many facsimiles. The presence of each book is almost palpable.

The Octavo Editions series covers classics in art, architecture, botany, zoology, religion, science and literature and, although the actual book is viewable in its pristine form, plenty of explanatory background material is provided as well. While the prospect of owning Gutenberg’s Bible, Redouté’s Roses or Tory’s Champ Fleury rang my bells, the following titles made this old English major positively salivate:

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the chef d’oeuvre of Aldus Manutius, the greatest printer of the Italian Renaissance, has fascinated poets, psychologists and iconographers for half a millennium. Anyone interested in dreams, erotica, alchemy, architecture, hieroglyphs, emblems, allegory or symbolism has probably stumbled upon this title and its hermetic illustrations and wondered about its author, its euphuistic language and its meaning.

It reads like a collaboration between Baron Corvo and Carl Jung. The real author is unknown even though the name Francesco Colonna is encrypted into the text. Joscelyn Godwin, whose 1999 translation is the only complete English version, pays lip service to Colonna in that volume, although two years earlier in Prague he told me that he was convinced by recent scholarship that Leone Battista Alberti, the humanist author and architect, wrote this strife of love in a dream. Whoever wrote it, the book is one of the most beautiful ever printed and all of that loveliness comes through in this disc.

Octavo has three Shakespeare offerings: Sonnets (1609), Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (1623), and Poems (1640). Sonnets, one of only 13 extant copies, allows us to see the sequence of 155 poems, including potentially significant typographic peculiarities, as it was first published. That means that “A Lover’s Complaint,” with its complementary parallel themes, often incorrectly separated from the sonnets, is here to give closure to the cycle.

Shakespeare’s dramatic works, the First Folio, is the sole authority for half of his plays and the single most important book in all of English literature. As Joyce said when asked what single book he would take to a desert island, “I should like to say Dante, but I would have to take the Englishman because he is richer.” The quality of this copy, formerly owned by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts who kept it in an ornamental casket carved from the famous Herne’s Oak of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a gift from Queen Victoria, surpasses that of the copies I have seen at the Huntington, Morgan Library, or the one loaned to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Poems is a bit of a curate’s egg since the publisher, John Benson, omitted eight sonnets, reordered the rest and altered the pronouns to obfuscate the fact that some of Shakespeare’s most passionate utterances were to a young man. Some but not all of Shakespeare’s other non-dramatic poetry is here as well as poems by such of his contemporaries as Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh and the too-little-known Richard Barnfield. His “If music and sweet poetry agree” and “As it fell upon a day” were long thought to be by Shakespeare himself.

When Dr. Samuel Johnson almost single-handedly compiled his Dictionary (1755) he created both a masterpiece of English lexicography and of literature. He gave elegant definitions and cited classic examples for 45,000 words. My favorite has always been his definition – vexing to the Scottish – of oats: “A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” With these Octavo discs, you have instant access to every entry.

William Blake is also represented by three works. Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794 and 1826) allows us to compare an early and late version of the great mystic’s most famous and beloved illuminated work. The stained-glass-like reproductions, the monitor’s light coming from behind the image, surpass even the old Trianon Press printings. Blake hand-colored his printed works, his style evolving as he got older, so each copy is a unique variant.

Blake’s 43 engravings for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) reveal that the artist was greater than the writer whose words he was illustrating. Blake’s images bring out a depth in Young’s poems that lay dormant before their pairing. Again, two stylistically different hand-colored copies are presented in full.

The Book of Urizen (1818), a gnostic meditation on the sources of human consciousness, with Urizen (“your reason”) as an imprisoning demiurge, is among Blake’s greatest achievements as poet, painter and printer.

My printing teacher, Harry Duncan, used to say that the greatest printers of all time were Gutenberg, Blake and William Morris. The Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer’s Works (1896) is Morris’ crowning achievement. The illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, whose copy this was, fit the text and exquisite borders perfectly. The making of the handmade paper, the acquiring of the German ink, the cutting of the Troy typeface demonstrate the same intentionality we associate with the alchemist or the rites of the Golden Dawn mages.

This project is exciting not only because of the texts chosen, their low cost and high quality, but because it puts in the hands of the average reader materials that normally are examined by only the most prestigious scholars. This series is doing for the study of books what VHS and DVD have done for film study and what the CD has done for music study: make them not just the private preserve of a few elitist collectors and scholars, but the common cultural property of all of us, as it should be. It is the democratic fulfillment of Gutenberg’s dream.

For more information about Octavo Editions see www.octavo.com, or call (800) 754-1596.

Courtesy of Octavo Editions

Octavo’s reproductions of the title page of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. B

The Truth About Bats with bat conservationist Maggie Hooper at 7 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free. For school age children. 525-6155.

Lunar Lounge Express, A party under the stars to view the Red planet at 8 p.m. at the Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $15-20. 336-7300. www.chabotspace.org

Day of the Dead Celebration on Solano Ave. Gather at 6:30 p.m. at Solano and Alameda. Bring a photo of those you wish to remember, a candle, flowers or food to feed their souls. 527-5358. www.solanoave.org

Three Beats for Nothing sings early music for fun and practice at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 655-8863.

Cinéma and Dinner at The Alliance Française of Berkeley at 7 p.m. at 2004 Woolsey St. Free, but everybody brings something. 548-7481 or afberkeley@sbcglobal.net

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Haunted House performance tour at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 6 p.m. at Oakland School for the Arts, 1800 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5-$7, children under 7 free. 873-8800.

Halloween Bazaar with face painting, children’s games, apple bobbing, pumpkins, rummage sale, book sale, food, crafts, and a haunted house from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The New School of Berkeley, 1606 Bonita St. at Cedar. 548-9165.

“Gaza Disengagement and the Importance of Equal Rights for Palestinians” with Ilan Pappe, historian and senior lecturer in political science at Haifa University, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Cost is $20.

Village Gathering for African Americans with Disabilities A day of information, resources and support at the Cesar Chavez Educational Center, 2825 International Blvd., Oakland. Conference from 8:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. followed by vendor fair to 4 p.m. 547-7322, ext. 15.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312.

SUNDAY, OCT. 30

Remember to Set Your Clocks Back at 2 a.m.

Pumpkin Carving Bring your own pumpkin and we will get creative in carving them. From 2 to 4 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Autumn Family Day at the Richmond Art Center Pumpkin-carving, mask-making, apple-bobbing and performan-

Halloween Street Scare All ages block party with face painting, mask making, pumpkin carving, costume contest, games and food, from noon to 5 p.m. at 23rd and Telegraph, in downtown Oakland. 238-9171. www.rpscollective.com

Day of the Dead Fruitvale Festival with artists, performers, vendors and informational service providers from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at International Boulevard between Fruitvale Ave. and 41st Ave., Oakland. 535-7176.

“Murder Mystery in the Kensington Library” A community participatory event at 2 p.m. at 61 Arlington Ave. Free. 524-3043.

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org

MONDAY, OCT. 31

Halloween at Habitot, a not-too-scary event for infants and toddlers at 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111, ext. 16.

Critical Viewing An ongoing group to examine the art/craft(iness) of short films and television productions and its effects on our daily lives, at 1 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Free. 848-0237.

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425.

TUESDAY, NOV. 1

Birdwalk on the MLK Shoreline from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. to see the shorebirds here for the winter. Beginnners welcome, binoculars available for loan. 525-2233.

Flu Shots for Berkeley Residents age 60 or over or “high-risk” from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Health Clinic, 830 University Ave. For information call 981-5300.

Nonviolent Activists from Palestine/Israel Palestinian Ayed Morrar and Israeli Jonathan Pollak will speak on their work in nonviolent resistance to the occupation in Palestine at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 236-4250. www.norcalism.org

Zonta Club of Berkeley meets at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. The speaker will be Rita Maran, President United Nations Association, East Bay. Dinner is $21. Reservations required. Please RSVP to 925-376-4370. www.zonta.org

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss “Current Elections” from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Please bring snacks and soft drinks to share. No peanuts please. 601-6690.

University Press Books Book Party celebrating new books by Charis Thompson and Trinh T. Minh-ha at 5:30 p.m. at 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Al Young, the California Poet Laureate on “Creativity is Human Survival: A Poet’s View” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.

Benefit with Dolores Huerta, United Farmworkers at 7:30 p.m., at St Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison. Donation $10. To benefit School of the Americas Watch. 597-0171.

Latinos in Baseball with Tito Fuentes and Diego Segui at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Tenth and Oak Sts. 238-2200. www.museumca.org

Seven years after Jerry Brown was elected mayor of Oakland in part on a promise that his “10K Initiative” would lead to a retail revival in the city’s downtown, the area where the housing component has been most successful has yet to see the promised commercial development.

The City of Oakland’s 10K Housing webpage says that in Brown’s inaugural address, he “proposed a four-year goal of attracting 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland as a way to revitalize the physical, economic, and cultural environment of the area.” It adds that “the 10K Housing Initiative is not just about housing—it is also about creating an environment that is conducive to residential development, through the transformation of the downtown into a more livable space that incorporates streetscapes, parks, commercial, retail, and other amenities.”

Earlier this year, ABC news reported that 5,800 of the 6,000 residential units needed to meet Brown’s 10K goal have either been completed or were under way. Of these, more than 1,100 are contained in seven separate loft developments in the area east of Broadway between Jack London Square and the 880 freeway. Another two hundred units in the same area have either been given city approval for construction or are in the design review phase. Last spring, the San Francisco Chronicle said Brown was making “dramatic progress in his ambitious (10K) plan.”

But along the commercial corridor of Lower Broadway, where Brown’s promised retail revitalization would presumably follow the residential successes, progress has not been so dramatic. In some instances, it appears to have gone backwards.

Of 26 commercial addresses between Jack London Square and Fourth Street on Broadway, four appear to be long-term vacancies, with windows papered or boarded over and one of them, the old On Broadway club near the the corner of Fourth, sporting a message on the marquee that reads “Thank You. Bye.” Three other commercial addresses in the same stretch are closed and undergoing renovations, with one of them, the old Bluesville club at Second, sporting a For Lease sign. Two of the office complexes in the area have had vacancies for several weeks.

A number of office complexes along Fourth Street between Broadway and Franklin also sport “for lease” signs, monuments to the collapse of the dotcom boom.

In addition, two of the operating establishments in Lower Broadway—Carpenters Union Local 2236 and the Secrets Adult Superstore porn shop—would not appear to fit the mayor’s commercial revival vision.

Third District Councilmember Nancy Nadel, whose district includes the western portion of Lower Broadway and who is running for mayor in next year’s election, said that several commercial projects are “in the pipeline” for that area, but most of them are in Jack London Square itself.

Nadel said that developers have proposed a project next to the historic Last Chance Saloon in the square “that will look a lot like the Ferry Building in San Francisco,” with a large first floor store and “smaller concessions” on the upper floors. East of Jack London Square, she said, another development is planned for the old train station, with a parking structure and a grocery store.

But Nadel added that proposals do not always translate into finished projects.

“You can promise a lot of things,” she said, “but it’s hard to attract retail into these areas, particularly department stores,” which economic observers have said is one of downtown Oakland’s critical needs. Nadel said it is her understanding that “no department store in the country is expanding at this point.”

The only major development currently in the works for Lower Broadway itself between Fifth and the Embarcadero, according to Nadel, was a controversial high-rise housing and commercial complex on the 2nd and Broadway property currently occupied by the Jack London Inn. The proposed project has received criticism both for the fact that it would violate the height limits in the city’s Estuary Plan as well as not including room for low-income residents.

“It’s not a mixed-income proposal,” Nadel said. “Inclusionary zoning hasn’t been a priority of Mayor Brown.”

The Lower Broadway corridor is considered an important part of Oakland’s downtown development because it connects Jack London Square—considered Oakland’s commercial gateway—with the Old Oakland development area, Chinatown, and Oakland’s downtown proper. But Oakland officials have long been faced with two problems in trying to complete that connection. The first is the Alameda County Probation Center and the Alameda County Social Services Agency, two dirty, dreary block buildings sitting across Broadway from each other between Fourth and Fifth streets. The second is the Highway 880 freeway overpass, a gloomy, uninviting, dangerous-looking tunnel under which pedestrians must walk to get between Lower Broadway and the rest of downtown.

To West Oakland Commerce Association Vice President Steve Lowe, the problem of the area beneath the overpass, at least, would not be hard to overcome.

“They had a similar problem in Sacramento with the Old Sacramento development separated from downtown by the freeway overpass,” Lowe said. “They solved it creatively by building walkways and other amenities.”

Lowe, who has spent several years trying to goad city officials into developing Lower Broadway and the adjacent produce district, where he lives, said the real problem is that the area is not high on the city’s priority list.

“For years, the emphasis has been on development of Jack London Square itself,” Lowe said. “For a long time, that was under the authority of the Port of Oakland, and the Port was under pressure to fill up the retail spaces on the square. There wasn’t much interest in walking across Embarcadero and looking at the rest of the area.”

Lowe said that attitude appears to have continued under private developers Jack London Partners, which bought the retail core of Jack London Square from the Port of Oakland several years ago.

“They appear to still see Jack London Square as separate from Lower Broadway,” Lowe said. “But when you talk to visitors to Oakland, they consider the ‘Jack London area’ as both areas, and because of the problems with Lower Broadway, they don’t think the area is doing well. The city has a responsibility to help develop the square, but also Lower Broadway. They don’t see it as yet.”

Lowe, who has long advocated that the Lower Broadway development should center around restoring and preserving the area’s historic properties, says that one of the reasons the success of Brown’s 10K has not yet translated into commercial success is because the mayor does not have enough people on his staff with retail experience.

“Most of Jerry’s economic advisors believe in official and residential development,” he said. “They just don’t have a good feel for retail and the specific requirements needed to put together a successful retail district. That’s one of the major areas the new mayor will need to address.”ö

Should Berkeley charge developers a fee to help alleviate traffic generated by their projects? And, if so, how much?

The purpose of the fee is to create programs, services and infrastructure improvements designed to reduce overall vehicle trips not only at individual project sites but throughout the city.

The proposed Transportation Services Fee, as originally proposed by Assistant Public Works Director Peter Hillier, would replace the fee charged by the city from 1985 to 1997, when a city attorney’s ruling suspended it because the ordinance failed to comply with provisions of the state Mitigation Fee Act.

Hillier’s proposal called for a $4,687 fee for each average car trip generated over the 20-year life of a project and is designed to recoup 20 percent of the city’s actual costs of mitigating the impacts of new traffic.

Adam Millard-Ball, the transportation consultant hired by the city to prepare the study from which the proposed fees were drawn, said that compared with other Bay Area cities, the proposed assessments were “on the high side for high-impact uses, in the mid-range for offices and near the low end for housing.”

But when the Berkeley Transportation Commission looked at his proposal Thursday, they voted to raise the sum to 25 percent of total costs and cut back on the kinds of projects that Hillier’s staff had suggested be offered lower fees because city policies favored them.

They called for reducing fees to 35 percent of that 25 percent for affordable housing projects and childcare centers, while exempting altogether second units added to residential properties.

Transportation Commissioner Sarah Syed had also called for reductions on student co-op housing projects, but her motion died for lack of a second.

The highest fees would be assessed on businesses like fast food eateries that generate more trips by fast turnover of their customers. More expensive restaurants, which generate a slower turnover, would be assessed less.

The measure approved by the Transportation Commission would assess projects approximately $6,084 for each new daily trip, based on a 20-year project life. Similar fees are charged by other Bay Area cities, and the Transportation Commission’s baselines would put Berkeley near the top of the list.

The staff report offered examples of fees on various projects.

One, a “West Berkeley Supermarket Complex” clearly based on the proposed new West Berkeley Bowl, calculated a $1.88 million fee for 386 new daily trips—a figure that would rise to $2.35 million under the Transportation Commission’s revisions.

The fee would not apply to the new Berkeley Bowl project because it is already in the development pipeline and the fees can’t be levied retroactively.

Fees for a mixed use affordable housing, office and retail project in downtown Berkeley generating 68 trips per day—clearly based on the David Brower Center and apartments—would be assessed at the reduced rate for the housing units, while paying the normal rates for other aspects of the project.

For a mixed-use residential and commercial project downtown generating 95 daily trips, the fee would be $577,998, compared to $462,398 if assessed full fees under the staff proposal.

Even assessments at the lower rate suggested by staff worried some members of the Planning Commission when they examined the plan during their Wednesday night meeting.

“In concept it’s a great idea, but it (the original $4,687 figure) seems like a high number to me,” said Planning Commissioner Helen Burke.

“If these kinds of fees are imposed, what is the impact on prospective development?” asked Chair Harry Pollack. “Some thought ought to be given that.”

Commissioner Rob Wrenn—who also serves as chair of the Transportation Commission—said the fees are “quite modest” and unlikely to have any impact.

Other cities have higher fees, Wrenn said, noting the examples cited in the staff study. “Also, how much more development can we have without addressing the impact? It’s not like it’s an unmitigated good to have more development.”

Planning Manager Mark Rhoades said the City Council wants to hold a public hearing on the fee—the only public hearing at any level on the proposal—in December.

Pollack held the issue over to the commission’s Nov. 30 meeting, giving its members time to prepare questions and comments before the proposal is heard by the council.

No members of the public commented on the proposal before the Planning Commission, but two developers were on hand at Thursday’s Transportation Commission meeting and ready with their comments.

Aran Kaufer, a former Landmarks Preservation Commission member who worker for developer Patrick Kennedy and now has his own development firm in San Francisco, appeared along with Brendan Heafey of Ruegg & Ellsworth to voice their concerns.

“I would rather see a fee on automobile users in Berkeley,” said Kaufer, suggesting no fees for single-vehicle households and escalating fees for each additional vehicle.

Commissioner Marcy Greenhut disagreed. The per-car fee, she said, “doesn’t target impacts but penalizes people who are already here.”

Calling the commission’s proposal a disincentive, Kaufer said, “There’s already a trend in Berkeley where people in the middle can’t afford to live here.” Kaufer also said the fee should be examined in conjunction with other development fees levied by the city, which would reveal that “suddenly, Berkeley is the most expensive city” for development.

Kaufer urged the commission to hold off action until it could examine the cumulative impact of the fees when added to all the others.

Millard-Ball had earlier stated that, “apart from childcare and affordable housing fees, Berkeley doesn’t have that many fees” when compared with other cities.

“I really think it is motivated by misdirected anger against the University of California, which will generate most of the new traffic” and can’t be charged any impact fees by the city, he said.

Even if developers include affordable units under the state and city density bonus regulations, “they will never be able to recover it all.”

Heafey said the fee would be a disincentive to infill development in Berkeley and would send would-be residents to the suburbs in search of housing.

“A trip-based fee penalizes our sale tax bases by penalizing restaurants and other businesses,” Heafey said. “The bottom line is that it will be felt in higher costs for housing and higher prices in our commercial businesses and restaurants.”

But the commission focused on the fee’s goal, which is to provide the funds for services and projects that will encourage fewer car trips, whether at the project in question or elsewhere in the city.

Among the programs that could be funded would be shuttle services, improvements in bicycle corridors and lanes, Eco Passes, carpools, increased signage and other measures aimed at increased bus travel, expansion of bicycle facilities at BART stations and bulb-outs on transit corridors.

City employees are driving less and using more alternative forms of transportation, according to a survey unveiled at Thursday night’s Transportation Commission meeting.

Drafted by Associate Transportation Planner Kara Vuicich, the survey was sent to 1800 city employees between May 24 and June 17. A total of 327 staffers responded, an 18 percent rate of return.

“The survey indicates significant improvements” in employee commute behavior, Vuicich wrote, with most of the positive changes correlating with the implementation of the city’s EcoPass and Commuter Check programs.

Between 2001 and this year, the rate of city staff responding to the poll who drive to work alone dropped from 47.4 to 36.4 percent. The drive-alone rates for city workers are well below the rates for all Berkeley workers, with a 54 percent drive-alone rate, and far lower than Alameda County workers in general with 71 percent.

BART commuters rose from 12.9 to 19.7 percent responding, while bus riders jumped from 6.2 to 13.8 percent. Bicyclers rose from 4.9 to 6.8 percent and walkers from 4.7 to 6.5 percent.

The only drop was seen in car- and van pool commutes, which fell from 12.8 to 7.7 percent.

The survey also offered a look at where Berkeley city employees live.

Of those responding to the poll, 39.4 percent live in the city, 14.1 percent live in Oakland, 5.8 percent in Richmond and 5.5 percent in San Francisco, followed by Albany and El Cerrito at 4.9 and 4 percent respectively.

The others are distributed throughout the Bay Area, ranging from Alameda, American Canyon and Antioch to San Pablo, Vallejo and Walnut Creek.

Of the total, 70 percent live in areas served by AC Transit, and 40 percent live in the same ZIP code as a BART station.

More than one in five employees lives within two miles of work, while 19.9 percent live 20 or more miles away, with the rest falling in between.

Nearby residents favor bicycles and shoe leather (or rubber) for commuting, while distant workers rely the most on car and van pools and BART.

Nearly half of the workers (46 percent) use the city’s $29-a-month transit subsidy.

Approximately 240 employees regularly use the EcoPass program, up from 189 in 2002.

The top three reason for workers who drive are:

• Because alternatives would lengthen their commute times (59 percent).

• Because they work late or irregular hours (58 percent).

• Because it’s too far to bike or walk (55 percent).

Half of the drive-alones said they’d be willing to try BART as an alternative, and 48 percent said they’d consider using a bus, while 31 percent said they’d be willing to try telecommuting.

Asked what incentives would encourage them to consider other modes of transit, 68 percent said financial subsidies would be a stimulus, 61 percent said a boost from the $20 now available for BART would do the trick and 59 percent said free bus passes would do the trick.

Based on survey results, Vuicich listed seven possible city measures that could encourage higher rates of alternative transit uses:

• Continuation and expansion of current programs and policies.

• Consideration of expansion of the EcoPass to include BART along with utilization of TransLink smart cards that would apply to both buses and BART.

• Increased subsidies to workers who use transit systems other than BART and AC Transit.

• New incentives aimed at drive-alone employees who live less than five miles away.

• Improved storage facilities and other incentives to encourage more bike ridership.

• New van and carpools for workers who live 20 or more miles from work.

Mark Treeker, an organizer with the organization The World Can’t Wait, led a mock detainee through Sproul Plaza Monday afternoon. Participants rallied against Boalt Hall Professor John Yoo’s role in drafting U.S. legal memos that the group says led to torture in places such as Guantanamo Bay and Iraq.

The protest was also a lead-up to a nation-wide rally the group is organizing for Nov. 2 to protest the anniversary of the re-election of George W. Bush.

Sunsara Taylor, a national organizer with the group, said that The World Can’t Wait is asking people to walk out of their jobs and school that day and gather at rallying points in 60 sites across the country, including a noon rally at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco followed by a march.

“People need to start putting their bodies in front of this juggernaut,” she said. “People are too willing to turn their heads and go to work like normal, go to school like normal.”

City Councilmembers will face a relatively light agenda when they meet tonight (Tuesday), including a proposed revision to Berkeley’s “by-right” home addition ordinance and two competing resolutions on the demolition of a UC Berkeley landmark.

Councilmembers Betty Olds and Gordon Wozniak have proposed changes to the existing ordinance that allow homeowners to add 499 square feet to their homes “by right.”

In a two-page item submitted to their fellow councilmembers, Wozniak and Olds said that they offered the amendment “to reduce the confusion (and) tension between neighbors and litigation” that have resulted from the current ordinance.

As the law now stands, owners can build additions of under 500 square feet without notifying neighbors, who often protest to the city and file suits over lost sunlight and views.

The Olds-Wozniak measure would allow owners to add 700 feet to their ground floors with a zoning certificate—which doesn’t require notice—but requires an administrative use permit, which requires notice, for all additions to higher floors.

Because the ordinance currently doesn’t specificy just how high a “story” can be—enabling additions of 20 feet or more in height—the new ordinance would specify a limit, though they didn’t offer a number.

The resolution calls on the council to direct the Planning Commission to come up with specifics and recommendations within 120 days.

Competing resolutions focus on the proposed demolition of the Bevatron on the grounds of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and the source of internationally acclaimed discoveries, the facility has since been eclipsed by other larger and more specialized accelerators and has been decommissioned.

At issue is whether to demolish the giant machine and the building which housed it or to preserve them and use the cleanup funds to restore contaminated ground water at the site.

Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak and Linda Maio have offered a pro-demolition resolution designed to support earlier, similar measures passed by the council, while the Peace and Justice Commission’s resolution calls for preservation and water cleanup.

Since the property belongs to the U.S. Department of Energy, neither resolution would have binding effect.

Wozniak is also the author of a proposed revision to the city’s ordinance for posting public notices of proposed changes in land use.

The measure offers no specifics, other than to recommend that the city manager tell the Planning Department and Planning Commission to consider modifying requirements for post notices of proposed land use changes in a way that doesn’t contribute to urban blight by creating “unnecessary clutter on street light poles and other public places.”

The measure was inspired by city postings that followed the spring cleanup of notices, flyers and other detritus from streetlight poles and other places in the Elmwood business district.

Also on the City Council agenda:

• Second reading votes on the previously approved condominium and soft story building ordinances and the zone and planning changes required before the Gilman Street Playing Fields can be built;

• A $492,172 addition to the city’s contract with Cale Parking Systems USA to add more of the new parking pay stations in the North Shattuck Avenue and Southside areas;

• A measure to allow the city to add six Toyota Prius hybrid cars to the city fleet from San Francisco Toyota;

• A resolution authorizing the city manager to negotiate a five-year contract with the Alameda County Housing and Community Development Department to provide shelter for Berkeley’s homeless over the next five years, with costs not to exceed the $747,120 provided by a federal grant.

• An appeal by neighbors of a Zoning Adjustments Board action approving a three-car garage addition to a home at 1732-34 La Vereda Road.

Berkeley planning commissioners will get their first chance Wednesday to ponder rezoning West Berkeley to attract car dealerships.

The proposal, pushed by Mayor Tom Bates to keep car dealerships and their hefty sales tax revenues from fleeing the city, has been strongly opposed by some West Berkeley business owners and artisans.

While no action will result from Wednesday’s discussion, commissioners will receive a city staff report on the proposal and hold a preliminary discussion on their suggestions.

The panel will also hold a hearing on another controversial West Berkeley project, the proposed second store and warehouse for the Berkeley Bowl.

The same activists who are opposing Mayor Bates’s proposal to bring car sellers onto their turf have blasted the supermarket project as both a source of additional traffic on highly traveled Ashby Avenue and as the latest commercial intrusion on land zoned for manufacturing and light industrial uses.

The commission will open the 7 p.m. meeting in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., to public comments as part of the public review process for the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Report. For a look at the Berkeley Bowl environmental document, see www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/planning/landuse/Heinz/DEIR/default.htm.

ZAB considers new condominium and retail project

On Thursday, the Zoning Adjustments Board will face a ful agenda, with the largest single project being the proposed two-building, five-story condominium and retail project at the northwest corner of University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

Developers Hudson McDonald, LLC have proposed 186 condominiums and 4,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space plus 71 parking slots in a basement garage for the site now occupied by a mini-mall whose tenants include Kragen Auto Parts.

City staff is recommending that unless the developers redesign the project, ZAB should turn thumbs down.

ZAB already gave the project a highly unfavorable review on April 28, panning the design by Kirk Peterson, whose most notable Berkeley buildings were Patrick Kennedy’s Gaia and Bachenheimer buildings.

Hudson and McDonald teamed with Kennedy on many of his projects before setting out on their own, and the Kragen project was Kennedy’s originally.

As currently proposed, plans call for a five-story project with the bulk of its mass along MLK.

Neighbors along Berkeley Way to the north have raised strenuous objections, pointing to the building’s shadow effects on their own homes and to the parked cars it could bring to their already crowded street.

Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests first applied for a permit in September 2002, and the document was deemed complete last Dec. 9 after clearances from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The city’s Design Review Committee panned the project, faulting its massive appearance from the street, a lack of open space, and relatively limited commercial space.

In April, ZAB members indicated they weren’t inclined to grant the eight zoning variances required and declared that the project abused the state density bonus ordinance, which allows larger-than-standard structures for projects that offer affordable housing.

Members also said the project didn’t include enough parking.

The city staff report prepared for Thursday’s meeting lists nine grounds for denial, including one that holds the project “would be detrimental to the health, safety, peace, morals, comfort or general welfare of people who live or work nearby and that it would also be detrimental to adjacent property owners.”

The report, by Senior Planner Steve Ross, calls for a redesign either to four floors or adding a fifth floor stepped back from the fourth along Berkeley Way, more setbacks along Berkeley Way, an increase to 156 parking spaces, increased commercial floor area and larger courtyards and open space.›

Ignacio Chapela, the UC Berkeley professor whose tenure battle came to symbolize the movement to protect scientific research from corporate interests, withdrew his lawsuit against the school last week, but promised to continue to “expose a deeply damaging miscarriage of the university’s mandate.”

Chapela sued the UC Regents last spring for wrongfully denying him tenure because of his opposition to the university’s deal with pharmaceutical company Novartis. A month after he filed suit Chapela was granted tenure, but he did not withdraw his suit.

Chapela said he hoped the suit would expose the mishandling of his tenure case but came to realize, after meeting with his lawyer and supporters for six months, that he must find other means to that end.

“The claims I made are still valid,” said Chapela in an interview, “but I realized people will get the image that I got what I wanted and am still whining. That’s the opposite of what I wanted, which was to create a chink in the armor of this massive system that is UC.”

Chapela said he will not abandon his efforts to hold the university accountable. In a statement he said, “I look forward to continue challenging, in the best forums that I can find, what I believe is a corrupt and illegitimate takeover of the public university away from its public mandate.”

Now, however, he faces the world from a new vantage point.

“My decision to take tenure was my decision to become an insider when I wasn’t,” Chapela said, “And that brings in a whole set of conflicts of interest.”

“He’s not uncomfortable being out on his own,” said Michael Pollan, a science and food writer who teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It took a certain strength being in opposition, and in some ways being accepted is harder for him.”

Chapela, 45, with a cherubic face beneath a shock of gray hair, became a hero to some and an agitator to others when he loudly opposed the College of Natural Resources’ contract with Novartis, a company where he had worked years earlier. He generated international debate on the issue of genetic engineering when he co-authored a controversial article about GMO-tainted native corn in Mexico.

Chapela sees himself as an outsider, a “mutt,” he said. Born in Mexico City, he received his B.S. from Mexico’s Universidad Autonoma and then completed a doctorate in mycology (the study of fungi) in Wales. Chapela worked for Sandoz Agra, a pharmaceutical subsidiary of Novartis in Switzerland and then for the United States Department of Agriculture and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. He took his current position at UC Berkeley in 1996.

“I am not a thoroughbred academic in any possible way,” said Chapela. “I am committed to doing science that has public relevance, and the only way I can do that is if I am heard and seen by the public.”

Chapela said his new ambition is to create a system of interactive maps that chart the presence of genetically modified organisms (plants which contain genes from other plants or animals, such as herbicide-tolerant soybeans) in crops around the world. Funding the maps will require generating venture capital.

“I will have to make sure I am not doing the very thing I have been complaining about other people doing,” Chapela said.

The transgenic maps would document the consequences of genetic engineering, he said. Chapela said he realized that such a project could upset his supporters. If, for example, he identifies transgenic material in organic fields, he could embarrass and anger organic farmers.

“I could make many people unhappy,” Chapela said. “But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it. That is why I’m tenured, to ask this kind of question.”

In response to accreditation warning letters sent out by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) earlier this year, the Peralta Community Colleges District and its four member institutions released mandated reports last week outlining progress made in addressing WASC’s criticisms.

“I’m confident that we’ve dealt with their concerns,” said Peralta Public Information Officer Jeff Heyman.

Last January WASC sent out virtually identical warning letters to the presidents of Laney, Merritt, Alameda, and Vista colleges as well as to Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris, citing the failure of the Peralta District to implement a district-wide strategic educational and financial plan, the failure of the district to implement a plan to fund the district’s long-term health care benefit liability, and interference of the district’s Board of Trustees in the day-to-day operation of the district.

The WASC complaints concerning Peralta’s Trustee Board were mostly aimed at individuals no longer connected with the district. Last November, two months before the WASC letters were released, four new members joined the seven-member Peralta Trustee Board, replacing trustees who chose not to run for re-election.

Since that time, the trustee board has instituted increased oversight over district activities, but has stressed that they do not believe such oversight constitutes interference.

The January WASC warning letters were a follow-up to reports on the colleges made by WASC accrediting evaluation teams last November, and cited what WASC called “the district’s failure to satisfactorily address the recommendations made to it” in those earlier reports.

The letters were signed by Accrediting Commission Executive Director Barbara Beno, who served as Vista College’s president for 12 years, and before that served as director of research and planning for the Peralta Community College District.

Although the complaints made in the WASC warning letters were against actions by the district office and the board of trustees and not the colleges themselves, if the complaints weren’t addressed, WASC could pull accreditation from the four colleges.

Heyman said that each college convened special committees to address WASC’s concerns.

“They’ve been working pretty hard on this,” he said. “We’re all pretty impressed with what they’ve done.”

Heyman said that the next step in the process will be for WASC to revisit and re-evaluate the Peralta Colleges based upon the information contained in the progress reports.

A month ago, for the first time in 40 years, Barbara Morita walked into a church in El Cerrito and sat quietly in a pew.

Many regular churchgoers use their time at church to drift off, to forgive, to try to forget. But Morita went in with a specific goal. She prayed for the people she had left behind in New Orleans.

“There was one point where our convoy had stopped on the freeway and there was this man running after the convoy pushing an old lady in a wheelchair, and we had to keep going,” she says. “We knew that if we stopped and started giving care that we would never make it to the Superdome.”

Morita is a physician’s assistant at Berkeley High School. When she is not treating the fevers and rashes of the teenage population, she travels to disaster zones with the CAL-6 Disaster Medical Assistance team and provides care for people whose lives have been shredded by natural disaster, war, or terrorism.

Last month, Morita was in New Orleans.

On the way to the Superdome, Morita says, her medical team was besieged with people asking for help. Many of the faces are now a blur, but the elderly woman on the side of the highway and her desperate companion made a lasting impression on Morita.

After working at the Superdome for 20 hours, the medical team left the next day for Baton Rouge and drove back along the same freeway.

“When we came out, she was there in her wheelchair on the side of the freeway,” Morita says. “She was dead.”

Morita thought of the woman in church last Sunday. She asked for peace for her, she says, “and for the man who committed suicide, for all of the people who were in pain who did not get help, all of the people who suffered so much.”

Morita works out of a small, tidy office in the Berkeley High Health Center. She is surrounded by the buzz and urgency created by a building full of teenagers with all their crises, real and imagined. Inside her office, all is calm, her paperwork organized in neat piles on her desk, sun streaming in through the window. In the window, Morita has hung a print her co-workers bought her when she returned from New Orleans. Morita holds it up and traces the black lettering: “It’s the Chinese character for peace and harmony,” she explains.

Morita is a soft-spoken, gracious woman. She dresses casually, in T-shirts and loose slacks, and wears her long black hair pulled back by two barrettes. Her face is tanned and lined and she wears no makeup. She is still and serious but laughs easily. Above all, she is steady. She has a kind of stillness about her that many people spend years in an ashram trying to achieve.

During several long conversations about her time in New Orleans, Morita is interrupted many times. Nurses come in and out to get pills and shots. The phone rings, the receptionist interrupts. A girl is here, she has an odd rash, can Morita see her? One afternoon, Morita has just sent a girl in anaphylactic shock to the hospital for treatment. Berkeley High students usually get taken to Children’s Hospital. But the girl’s aunt called, panicked, unable to locate her.

Morita gets on the phone and starts making calls—Children’s first, then Kaiser, then Alta Bates. She is measured and patient with everyone she deals with, never becoming exasperated, even when she has to repeat the girl’s name multiple times. She finds the girl at Alta Bates. She calls the aunt. More soothing.

It’s a kind of calm you have to possess, Morita says, if you are going to do the kind of work she does. She has spent much of her adult life treating people in pain. Morita grew up in El Cerrito, did well in school, and enrolled in UC Berkeley for pre-med. But after one year at UC Berkeley, Morita dropped out of pre-med, demonstrated against Vietnam, worked for a farm workers’ union and went to school to become a physician’s assistant. She married, had three girls, and worked for a number of community clinics—Asian Health Services, La Clinica de la Raza and Health Care for the Homeless. She gravitated toward the vulnerable and financially strapped: Mexican janitors with no insurance, immigrant Asian hairdressers with no workplace coverage.

“My motivation has always been that I do believe that health care is a basic right,” Morita says. “And in the United States it is obviously not, it is a commodity that you purchase. I wanted to do my part to make it accessible to people who cannot otherwise afford it.”

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in late August, Morita was struck by the images of the suffering and, apparently, the abandoned. She packed her bags, kissed her husband and girls goodbye, and headed south.

A month later, she is still experiencing the aftershocks.

When Morita’s team arrived on Aug. 31, they organized themselves on the upper level of an ice arena next to the Superdome that had been converted into a makeshift medical treatment area.

“When we got there, all the medical tents on the lower level the previous team had been using were flooded and contaminated with fecal matter,” she says. “We couldn’t use the tents, so we set up camp two floors above.”

Morita says the conditions were appalling and almost impossible to work in.

“There was no lighting,” she says. “There was no air movement. The toilets were backed up. It was horrible and hot and stuffy. The place was filthy.”

Morita says the patients she saw were a mixture of critically injured and less serious cases, or, as she calls them, the “walking wounded.”

“We had a baseline of more minor complaints—people needing medication, diabetes treatment, walk-in clinic type patients,” she says. “And then on top of that we had the National Guard carrying in people that were unconscious, who were having seizures, heart attacks and who had collapsed.”

Morita also saw patients who had been severely beaten and one man with gunshot wounds. Five women were in various stages of labor. In the 20 hours Morita was there, one baby was born.

“It had the feel of total chaos,” she says.

Helicopters stopped removing critically ill patients on the morning of Aug. 31 because snipers were shooting at them, Morita says. Buses did not arrive until Sept. 2, so critically ill patients languished for two days.

“There were so many patients that needed care that we could not give them,” she says. “I felt helpless and so frustrated and angry that people were stuck in this situation.”

After working at the Superdome, sleeping about three hours and chewing on half a Power Bar, she headed out to the airport at Baton Rouge. The situation at the airport was much more organized. There was a triage center, and patients were put into one of three areas: red for critically ill, yellow for less urgent, green for minor.

“There was also what we call an expectant area, which was curtained off. That’s where people were placed who we were expecting to die.”

A lone minister tended to these patients, offering comfort and last rites.

“It was a dignified place for them to die,” Morita says. “It was quiet and calm. But it was very sad because they were so alone.”

Since returning to Berkeley on Sept. 9, she has had insomnia and nightmares and says, “the images come back at strange times.”

The hardest part, she says, was treating patients, then leaving them and not knowing what happened to them. She still thinks about individual patients.

One woman had a terrible skin infection: “nasty and extensive and wet and smelly.” Morita had no way to properly clean it and lacked the proper antibiotics to treat it. “She needed lab tests and good wound care and the right medication. I hope she got the right treatment,” she says.

There was a little boy in sickle cell crisis that they could not care for properly. There was a 12-year-old boy who could barely speak. His mother was concerned for his mental health and would not take him back into the Superdome; she says he had seen dead bodies and violent acts.

“I can’t take him back in,’ she kept saying. He’s seen too much,” recalls Morita.

Morita met with the other members of her team a week after returning home to Berkeley. They too were having a hard time adjusting to everyday life again.

“More guys cried than women,” Morita says. “Many of them cried and said they had felt so helpless down there, unable to help people.”

One former soldier-turned-medic was having flashbacks of traumatic experiences in combat zones, she says. “A couple of the guys, what they saw and felt brought them back to war experiences. One guy was very vividly re-living being in Somalia.”

One nurse Morita worked with was unable to return to work for a week after returning.

But most bounced back fairly quickly, she says: “You keep putting one foot in front of the other. You just keep working.”

Morita says her experience in New Orleans gave her perspective on what real discomfort and pain are.

“Since being back, I have a lot less patience for twitter,” she says. “You know, people complaining about ‘it’s too hot in here.’ My philosophy is, if you and the people that you love are alive and well, it was a good day.”

Berkeley police are investigating the possible sexual abuse of a 6-year-old Oregon Street boy by an 11-year-old boy. Officers were notified by staff at Children’s Hospital in Oakland on Oct. 16 after the 6-year-old’s mother brought the child in for care.

Further details are not available, said police spokesperson Officer Steve Rego.

High school arrest

Officers arrested a 15-year-old Berkeley High student Wednesday on suspicion of receiving stolen property that was reported stolen by another 15-year-old student. Both are males, said Officer Rego.

Drug bust

Police arrested a 19-year-old man for selling cocaine near the corner of 62nd and King streets at 5 p.m. Wednesday along with his customer, a 46-year-old Richmond woman, who was charged with possession.

Strong-arm robbers

A strong-arm robbery team consisting of a young heavyset African American woman and her slimmer Caucasian partner are suspected in a series of robberies in Berkeley that occurred Wednesday and Thursday.

The first report came at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday from two 18-year-old women who were strong-armed out of their purses near the intersection of Channing Way and College Avenue. They told officers the women fled in a four-door sedan they identified as a white Dodge Neon.

The second call came two minutes after midnight.

A 19-year-old woman told officers that a pair matching their description had tried to take her purse as she was walking two hours earlier in the 2700 block of Piedmont Avenue.

The same pair may have been involved in a similar purse robbery just after 11 p.m. Friday in the 1600 block of 62nd Street, said Officer Rego.

Tobacco and more

What might have resulted in a simple citation for possession of tobacco by a minor turned into an arrest early Thursday afternoon when the 17-year-old female in possession of the dirty weed decided to resist and found herself facing the second and more serious charge of interfering with peace officers.

The incident occurred near the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Allston Way.

Bank robbery

Police are looking for the man with shoulder-length dreadlocks who walked into the Wells Fargo Bank at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Center Street just before 4 p.m. Thursday wearing a bright orange road worker’s vest and truck driver’s hat.

The African American robber presented a demand note and walked out the door with cash. He has not been apprehended, said Officer Rego.

Mother stabber

A 16-year-old female was arrested late Thursday afternoon after emergency room personnel notified Berkeley Police that her mother had arrived with a stab wound.

No further details were available.

Unlocked door

Residents of a dwelling in the 2100 block of Cedar Street learned the value of locking doors when they discovered Friday morning that person or persons unknown had taken advantage of their oversight and absconded with two laptop computers, an iPod MP3 player and a digital camera.

Miscue

Police arrested a 32-year-old Oakland man on suspicion of battery and brandishing a deadly weapon after he used his fist and a pool cue to beat a 15-year-old male in the 2000 block of Kittredge about 4 p.m. Friday.

Purse heist

A teenager strong-armed the purse away from a woman walking in the 1800 block of Ward Street just before 4:30 p.m. Friday. The victim said the fellow was wearing a white cap and a black shirt with a white collar and a ring pattern in the shoulder area. She estimated his age at between 15 and 18.

Luggage Center robbery

A scruffy-looking unshaven fellow with long shaggy dyed black hair betraying its graying roots walked into the Luggage Center at 2221 Shattuck Ave. just after 8 p.m. Friday, produced a pistol and demanded cash.

His loot in hand, he fled out the back door.

He is described at between 38 and 42 years of age, with shrunken cheeks and a medium build, standing about 5’9”.

Another gun, another purse

A gunman robbed a 35-year-old woman of her purse as she was walking in the 2900 block of California Street just after 11:30 p.m. Friday.

Spat takes nasty turn

A disagreement between employees of Golden Gate Fields took a nasty turn Saturday morning when a 19-year-old worker decided to attack his 44-year-old colleague with a rake.

The younger worker was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

Drugs and booze

Police arrested a 67-year-old Modesto man on a variety of charges including felony hit and run and felony driving under the influence of narcotics after he struck and injured a pedestrian near the corner of Dwight Way and Waring Street just after 7 p.m. Saturday.

Information on the victim was unavailable.

Stabbing

Nurses at the Summit Alta Bates Hospital emergency room notified police after a 19-year-old man walked into the emergency room bleeding from a stab wound shortly before 11 p.m. Saturday.

The man told police he’d been stabbed with a box cutter an hour earlier near the corner of Sacramento and Prince streets. He was unable to describe his assailant in any detail.

Possible gun

Spouting threats and making like he had a pistol in his pocket, a man in his late 20s robbed an 18-year-old woman of her purse as she walked along Parker Street near College Avenue shortly before 8:30 p.m. Sunday.

Another heist

A UC Berkeley student was robbed by two men about 1:10 a.m. Monday near the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Addison Street, UC Berkeley Police reported.

Your short summary (in the Oct. 21 article “Council Adopts Condo Conversion”) of the City Council’s Oct. 18 action regarding 2901 Otis St. was incorrect. The City Council did not deny neighbors’ appeal of the Zoning Adjustments Board decision approving the “pop-up” conversion of the small Victorian cottage currently on the site into a three-story, three-unit condo and the conversion of the cottage’s rear yard into a paved parking lot. Neither did the council deny the developers’ appeal of the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s conflicting decision designating it a structure of merit. The council voted unanimously to set both appeals for public hearing at its Nov. 15 meeting.

Robert Lauriston

•

UNITED NATIONS

Editors, Daily Planet:

It is good to see an account of recent disaster relief work by United Nations humanitarian agencies, including that being done right here in the U.S. (“Accentuate the Positive on U.N.’s 60th Anniversary,” Oct. 21).

This year, for the first time ever, 50 percent of the traditional Halloween trick-or-treat for UNICEF funds will be designated for children in the U.S. UNICEF boxes are available at the UNA Information and UNICEF Center, 1403-B Addison St., back of Adronicos on University Avenue in Berkeley.

Dorothy P. Wonder

•

CLARIFICATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

In your summary of City Council activity regarding 2615 Marin Ave., the comments could be interpreted that the project was approved one foot lower than the Zoning Adjustments Board’s previous approval and remanded back to ZAB. The project was approved with the one-foot reduction. Period. It was not remanded back to ZAB. Please clarify this point.

David Richmond

San Francisco

•

“REDSKINS”

Editors, Daily Planet:

Clearly Ms. Garrett is wrong to suggest that other Native-Americans should not be insulted by phrases they find offensive, but she does not. They are offended; now what are we going to do about it?

Coincidentally, a Cherokee woman who is a nursing administrator at NIH in Washington D.C. told me that the term “Redskin” was invented to describe natives who had been flayed; that is, who had been tortured by Europeans by having much of their skin cut off. While I cannot judge the historical accuracy of this claim, or Ms. Garrett’s, if many Native Americans believe this then the term is well beyond insulting to them.

Robert M. Marsh

•

SHARING IS GOOD

Editors, Daily Planet:

A corner store, a hot tub, a box to share clothes, neighbors that talk with one another, a music venue, a bulletin board, parties, public gathering spaces, artist colonies, community gardens, playgrounds. These are our treasures. These are the blooming of our community, the places where we meet others and share. They need to be honored, protected and improved.

I am frankly alarmed at this malignant attitude that attacks our collective culture with a desire for silence and isolation. If you are new to Berkeley, try it on, meet people, help others. Don’t try to “clean it up” so it resembles some sterile gated community. What impoverished souls will be born by isolating ourselves inside houses or offices with no noises from outside, no conversations with strangers, no way to share with someone different. Urban living is by nature loud and complex. I believe we should strive for quality sound created by our collective closeness; bird songs and happy children playing, the soft and regular hum of the train or BART, brooms on the sidewalk, a conversation, hellos, meows, a violin.

Our society is everyone. How the man on the sidewalk is doing is the measure of the health and joy of all. We cannot better this health by putting down others, ignoring people, hoping they go away. For they are us. We must not let the part of us that shares and cares go away. For that is the beauty of our kind. It takes grace and courage, patience and hope to open up to improving, not destroying for lack of perfection, our collective living.

Support the local liquor store and encourage them to carry some organic produce and plum jam from the teenagers at the community garden down the

street. Talk with your neighbors. Enjoy differences, respect the creativity of others. Thank them for the bench or fruit tree or bulletin board that they share with the neighborhood. Be nice. Maybe give a buck to the guy on the street.

And support the free-box in People’s Park. That park is still a special place where sharing happens. What it needs to be better is you! Bring something to share, have a picnic or a game, plant a flower, talk to a stranger, make it better.

Let a thousand sharings bloom.

Terri Compost

•

NEW DOWNTOWN PLAN

Editors, Daily Planet:

Here is an idea for the Berkeley downtown that the university and the city planners are working on. Why not fill the whole area with 15-story condo buildings? Then the price of a 1,000-square-foot luxury condo will drop from $400,000 to $200,000. The new residents will then be able to afford to eat at the fancy downtown restaurants and perhaps attend the theater. And in thanks to the development dream team of Bates, Wozniak, Moore and Maio, the new residents will become life-long voters and campaign donors. And in thanks to UC Berkeley for the new downtown, they will become life-long Bears sports fans., Go Berkeley! Go Bears! Rah! Rah! Rah!

George Tyler

•

INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING

Editors, Daily Planet:

The real solution to election problems is to count our first, second or third choice, whichever has widest support. The East Bay IRV movement was lead by Cal students in 2002-03, and your continued reporting is vital.

This Tuesday, the California Senate elections committee will host a forum titled “Instant Runoff and Ranked Choice Elections: Will They Lead To A Better Democracy?” Participants will include Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington. The forum will be held at 10 a.m. at the Elihu M. Harris Auditorium, 1515 Clay St. in Oakland, with a rally at 1 p.m. This is an historical event for local and state-wide election reform leadership and progress. It’s only a short bus or BART ride to support real election reform state-wide.

Sennet Williams

•

WILLIS-STARBUCK CASE

Editors, Daily Planet:

In P.M. Price’s opinion piece of Oct. 18, she labels my conclusions as to Meleia Willis-Starbuck’s culpability in her own death as “unjust.” No reasons are provided for this statement. Instead, Price seems more interested in attacking the Cal football players who may have been involved in this tragic situation, the integrity of the Cal football program, the University of California as an institution, and organized sports in America in general. He makes accusations about players withholding information, not coming forward etc. Is Price privy to the investigation of the case? How does she know about this?

I’m not privy to the “facts” of the case, other than what I’ve seen in the media. However, let me refer to the statements made by Danielle Youngblood, a close friend of Willis-Starbuck who witnessed the events of July 18, as reported immediately afterward in the San Francisco Chronicle. She noted that the altercation began when Willis-Starbuck and her friends declined to “party” with a group of young men, who then used immature, insulting language (“bitches” appears to have been the derogatory term). An argument ensued, with the women explaining to the young men why such language was inappropriate. According to Youngblood, the men then apologized for their language and Willis-Starbuck continued to talk with them as her “brother” Christopher Hollis arrived and made the fatal shot into the crowd that killed the girl.

At this point we don’t know who claimed that Hollis was asked by Willis-Starbuck to “bring the heat,” or if that even occurred. Hollis’ lawyer says it happened, and I guess we’ll find out at Hollis’ trial. But it does seem clear that Willis-Starbuck grossly overreacted by bringing a gun-carrying thug into a situation which in fact was not threatening, and lost her own life as a result. There’s nothing “unjust” about that conclusion.

I don’t know why Price is trying to shift the blame for this tragedy to football players, other than to put up a smokescreen so that Willis-Starbuck’s memory won’t be “tarnished.” In any case, the “analysis” offered by Price is facile, to put it mildly. I may be wrong, but I don’t see sports entitlement to be related in any significant way to this story. However, other avenues are worth exploring, such as a degraded “hood” culture where calling women bitches is common parlance and guns are used without a second thought to settle the most minor disputes.

But we can’t have that in Berkeley, can we? Why, it can only be racist to suggest it.

Price made one correct statement in her piece: “We bring our life experiences and biases to every situation. Objectivity is more of a goal than a reality.” Perhaps Price ought to work a little harder toward that goal.

In his Oct. 14 New York Times column, “Questions of Character,” Paul Krugman lamented the media’s failure to discern the true character of President Bush. Krugman observed that in 2000 the press portrayed George as an “honest, likable guy” and in 2004 as “a strong effective leader.”

By blaming his fellow journalists, the columnist glossed over the reality that for the past six years the American public has been assaulted daily by a permanent political campaign; one whose morality is not that of Jesus of Nazareth but instead that of Machiavelli of Florence. If Lorenzo de Medici was the Italian political theorist’s prince, then George W. Bush is Machiavelli’s president.

The media certainly shares some of the blame for five years of dreadful leadership. Why did pundits on both coasts ignore the warnings of Molly Ivins and Lou DuBose who had seen Texas Governor Bush in operation? Why did the press fail to listen when Ivins and DuBose noted that George W. had been a failure as a CEO? When they observed that his touted Christian faith appeared to stem from convenience rather than conviction? Why did the media look away when Ivins scoffed at Bush’s claim to have been the Environmental Governor, noting that Texas had the worst pollution in the nation?

The answer is that journalists were among the millions of Americans who were taken in by a presidential campaign scripted from the pages of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. The father of Realpolitik famously observed that “politics have no relations to morals,” and this aphorism serves as the motto for George Bush and company.

From the moment that Bush decided to run for president, his staff—principally Karl Rove and Karen Hughes—fabricated a image of George W. as a successful CEO, born-again Christian, effective governor, and all-around nice guy.

Bush played to these themes when he accepted the Republican nomination, depicting himself as “a uniter not a divider,” setting out his goals in a business-like manner, and vowing to, “usher in an era of responsibility … to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.”

The cornerstone of Bush’s propaganda campaign has been the assertion that he is a decisive, seasoned executive able to confront problems and make tough decisions. As our first MBA President, CEO Bush promised to bring the good ship America back on course. Famed management theorist Peter Drucker once observed that a successful CEO does not start by asking, “What do I want to do?” but rather “What needs to be done?” Instead, CEO Bush focused on his own agenda from the moment he took office and, in the process, ignored America’s most pressing problems. This myopia was tragically apparent in the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Political historians acknowledge that there are two competing standards used to evaluate any American president. One is to grade him strictly as America’s chief executive. The other standard views the president solely as a politician. From the Machiavellian perspective, Bush’s primary goal was to increase his power, rather than to confront America’s problems—to maintain the appearance of leadership while strengthening his position.

Each president confronts a variety of challenges. In his 2000 convention acceptance speech, Bush identified two perennial issues: bolstering America’s defenses, and strengthening the citizenry. Since taking office George W has been confronted with many new tests, including a faltering economy and global climate change.

On all four of these challenges, Bush the CEO has not fared well. America continues to spend far more on national defense than does any other nation, yet our overall security has deteriorated. Rather than strengthen the American family, the administration’s policies have weakened it. Bush the 43rd inherited a strong economy and a surplus, yet now there is stagnation and a steadily increasing deficit. Despite overwhelming evidence that global warming threatens the planet, the president stubbornly insists that there is no scientific consensus on the subject and, therefore, supports business as usual.

On the other hand, George W. has been remarkably successful as a politician. He was elected to two terms and kept his primary campaign promises: he’s cut taxes, brought his version of accountability to elementary education, massively increased funding to the military, and shrunken entitlements. His core constituencies strongly support him, and Republicans control Congress.

If Niccolo Machiavelli were to evaluate the Bush administration, he would find much to approve of. Machiavelli paid great attention to appearances and advised his prince to “strive to make everyone recognize in his actions greatness, spirit, dignity, and strength.” An essential ingredient was steadfastness, “he must insist that his decisions be irrevocable.” Machiavelli advised his prince to use cunning and “always [employ] religion for his own purposes.”

History will not judge Bush the CEO kindly. Rather than being seen as a responsible president, George W. will be viewed as someone who relentlessly avoided the crucial issues of his era, to the lasting detriment of the nation. On the other hand, Bush the politician, will gain high marks from all those for whom Machiavelli’s teachings remain the final word in effectiveness.

Richard Nixon once remarked, “You can’t fool all of the people, all of the time, but if you fool them once, it lasts for four years.” Amazingly, George W. Bush managed to bamboozle the electorate twice and now, despite his fallen ratings, we’re stuck with Machiavelli’s president.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and activist. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net.

In Tony Mirosevich’s non-fiction class at San Francisco State University, we are constantly asked to explore the soft, wavy lines between truth and fiction, between what is real and what is not real. For a recent assignment we were instructed to write about a personal memory and combine it with someone else’s memory of the same event, or write our remembrance of a singular occurrence at several junctures in our lives, filtered through time, emotion, and experience.

It wasn’t difficult for me to find a memory that fit all the above requirements. Years ago I published an essay about my dad having a mid-life crisis at the age of 32, and buying himself a sports car to cope with a mortgage, a wife and three small children. In the essay I described the make of the car, (a Ford Thunderbird), the color, (off-white), and the design (two bucket seats up front and a hard, bench-like seat in the back flanked by two porthole windows).

The purchase of that sports car caused enormous havoc in the life of our growing family. Even at the age of 7, I was aware of my mother’s angst and anger over the T-Bird. She thought my dad was an idiot for not buying her a practical Chevy station wagon, one she could drive to the A&P without worrying about her children’s comfort or her own suburban image.

The interior of the Thunderbird was low, dark, smoky, and mean, and the round gauges on the dashboard glowed an ominous green, reminding me of Russian Sputniks: dangerous, foreign, and prying. Inside, mounted on the doors and console, were ashtrays and places for highballs, should one want to smoke and drink while driving to the country club or grocery store. The most annoying characteristic of the Thunderbird was the backseat because something large, mysterious, and possibly essential to the engine rose up in the middle, causing whoever had to sit there to be uncomfortable and a tad put out. Hours before any car trip, no matter how insignificant, my brothers and I would argue about who would sit on the awkward bulge.

There were slamming doors, bloody noses, and missed important social engagements. More than once my brother Danny climbed into the car hours before a proposed errand to ensure that he would not get the middle position.

Finally, my mother suggested divorce and my father took the T-Bird away and brought home a boxy boring station wagon that had only six ashtrays (the proper number for a family of five in 1959), no portholes, and no place for highballs or travelers.

Immediately after the essay appeared in print, I received angry e-mails from Thunderbird fans all over the world. They informed me that I was mistaken about the design: Birds with round windows did not have backseats!

I dismissed the complaints as misguided fanaticism. I remembered those portholes. They were an important part of my childhood development and identity. Sitting in the backseat of the Thunderbird, looking out a round window, shaped my view of the world and my place in it.

I sent the essay to my father and brothers for confirmation. Danny e-mailed me back and claimed he did not remember the Thunderbird. Brother Bill was more emphatic. What in hell are you talking about? he asked. But my father’s response was the most disturbing. Susan, he wrote in an e-mail, we never had a T-Bird with portholes. You must be confusing our “square bird” with the “little bird” my friend Doc Thomas had. His was black. It didn’t have a backseat, but it did have those ridiculous windows.

Could it be possible that I never looked out a porthole window when I was a child? Did I only look into Doc Thomas’s oval windows and wish that I was looking out? Four years ago I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that my psyche was determined, in part, by those unique circular windows, and that everything I have said, done and thought since were influenced by my childhood round view of the world. It’s hard to accept that I am, in fact, just a common square-window person, masquerading as someone who is classy, cool, chic, and circular.

We all know that street crime is a problem in Berkeley. While we may differ as to its causes, we all understand that the economic transformation currently underway in South Berkeley is a huge contributor to that problem. Economic dislocation and gentrification are the realities of South Berkeley. In many neighborhoods, economic “gaps” between residents contribute to generate tension and suspicion. Newly arrived, white neighbors are offen are offended by the conditions they find in these neighborhoods. Working closely with police to identify “suspicious” people and “drug dealers,” neighborhood groups are finding “creative ways” to “combat” drug dealers. Apparently, this includes holding an 75-year-old woman responsible for “allowing” drug activity in her neighborhood.

Lenora Moore is an elderly African American woman who was born and raised in Berkeley. In 1919, Lenora Moore’s grandmother bought a house at 1610 Oregon St. Many years later, in 1963, Ms. Moore purchased the house from her grandmother and has lived there ever since. She has six sons, 36 grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren and a host of cousins, uncles and other family members throughout the Berkeley/Oakland area.

Ms. Moore’s family grew up in boom-town Berkeley, a Berkeley that was a land of opportunity because of the wartime shipbuilding and growing manufacturing sector. The good times did not last. By the 1970 and ‘80s the economic gap between whites and blacks was growing again. Gone were the days of good paying union jobs and the chance to learn a trade. The economy was changing, but it did not seem to provide for the working class residents of the city. Instead, with fewer opportunities and more temptation to participate in the illegal economy, street level drug dealing grew in many parts of the city.

Today, the neighbors of Ms. Moore contend that her relatives sell drugs, play loud music, leave litter around and are generally difficult to live near. A raid of the Moore house recovered some drugs in the room of one middle-aged son and a handgun. The son went to jail for this, but now the neighbors figure that Ms. Moore should be punished as well. They accuse her of failing to stop drug activity not only by a relative who she allowed to stay with her, but all drug activity”in the area.” They don’t seem to care whether Lenora had any part in the drug activity or not or whether she was even aware of it. They believe that the family itself attracts undesirable people to the neighborhood and their real objective is to get Ms. Moore to sell her house. This was made clear to Ms. Moore in letters from Neighborhood Solutions, Inc. on behalf of the neighbors.

Unfortunately, the neighborhood group bases much of its analysis on observations made from afar and based on heresay and generalizations. The Moore family is close to 100 people or more in this area. These are people who have lived in Berkeley for their entire lives. Ms. Moore’s house is widely known because the network of family and friends that have known and visited that house is huge. While the neighbors maintain that there is “drug activity” day and night, it is also true that there is a lot of traffic coming and going from the house because so many relatives feel that they have a connection to the house. Not every gathering of African Americans is for the purpose of drug dealing as the case presented by the neighbors might suggest.

The fact that the law allows neighbors to punish an elderly woman for failing to do what the city’s Police Department could not is beyond absurd. It is racist and wrong. This is a woman who goes to work everyday and struggles to keep her family together. Her record of service to this community spans 60-plus years. She started programs for children, clinics for women, services for the elderly and a huge variety of public service projects. To the degree that members of Ms. Moore’s family have need of drug rehabilitation, therapy, education and financial assistance, they should be given this help. Perhaps the situation would not have become so tense if someone had recognized that Ms. Moore was struggling and doing her best to keep up with the demands of so many grown children and grandchildren. What Lenora needs is help not punishment.

Rather than the adversity that a courtroom situation promotes, the neighbors and Ms. Moore would be best served by a problem-solving, relationship building approach. The fact is that Ms. Moore is the social net for her family. She continues to struggle to feed those who are hungry; take in the children if the mother is not able to parent; give rides, make calls and try to help her relatives to get their lives together. The stability she provides could also be said to offer the possibility of rehabilitation.

If the neighbors succeed and Ms. Moore is forced deeper into debt, what will have been accomplished? South Berkeley will still have a drug problem and the neighbors will be no closer to achieving what they claim to want. Make no mistake; the neighbors have complaints and they deserve to have these complaints heard. Yet, if we truly have a mind for justice—real justice—then a woman whose greatest crime is loving her family and trying to help them get on their feet would not be facing the possibility of poverty and homelessness.

Andrea Prichett is a member of CopWatch and a South Berkeley resident.

Smart students! Nobel prizes! Touchdowns! Is this what the “blue and gold” means to you? If so, you may not realize that along with the good comes a dark side that dominates the lives of those who live near UC. If gold reflects the prestige and glamor of UC Berkeley, then blue represents the bruised and distressed Berkeleyans who underwrite that glamor.

It is UCB’s immediate neighbors who bear its major burdens: traffic, parking problems, congestion, noise, litter, almost continuous construction impacts, and other problems caused by some misbehaving students. Meanwhile, taxpayers citywide subsidize UCB with over $11 million per year. The damages will increase if the UCB adds 2.2 million square feet of new construction and more than 5,000 new campus users.

Berkeleyans for a Livable University Environment (BLUE) is an organization formed about two years ago by residents of neighborhoods near UCB, in response to increasing damage to Berkeley’s quality of life caused by the university. BLUE believes that the university and the citizens of Berkeley must have a relationship of equity and mutual respect. BLUE acknowledges the many positive ways in which the university contributes to the community, but BLUE does not accept the status quo, in which the costs of university activities are disproportionately borne by the city and the surrounding community.

Now UCB and LBNL are poised to expand and increase their “take.” The City of Berkeley should do everything in its power to protect the city’s residents from the increasing physical and financial burdens of these two institutions. Reducing the damage done to Berkeley residents by the university, and achieving a fair relationship between the city and the university, is vital to the future livability of our city.

BLUE is committed to creating a livable environment for everyone. Sadly, to the disbelief of informed observers, the city recently signed an agreement with UCB that permits all existing damage to continue, that does nothing to prevent further damage, and which even reduces Berkeleyans’ ability to create and protect our own downtown. This is why four members of BLUE are suing to stop the agreement.

For those who are not familiar with the “blue” that accompanies UC’s “gold,” BLUE highlights the following major areas of community damage:

Transfer of the commons

The “commons” are the shared resources of our urban environment that belong to us all. Over the decades, the university has expropriated more and more of Berkeley’s commons. These include roadways, where over-intensity of UCB use increases traffic, municipal costs, and emergency access hazards; on-street parking spaces, which are removed from the city’s commercial and residential use and transferred to UCB; sidewalks, which are unnecessarily taken from public use during UCB construction; historic resources, which have been compromised and destroyed by UCB projects; open space, a limited resource that insofar as possible should be maintained for the pleasure of all Berkeleyans; aesthetic resources, including views, mature trees, and freedom from noise pollution—all damaged by UCB; and natural resources such as groundwater and creeks, which UCB activities have diminished and contaminated.

Financial impacts

Intensely used, tax-exempt properties owned or leased by the university create a large hidden fiscal impact on Berkeley taxpayers. Services provided to UCB cost Berkeley taxpayers over $11 million annually, and other universities similar to UCB pay their host cities up to $14 million per year. Imagine the more beautiful and livable city we might have today if we had received $11 million per year for the past 30 years to improve downtown, Southside, and our poorer areas of town. With our limited resources and many vital civic projects going unfunded, Berkeleyans cannot continue to support this large and wealthy institution. The city should use all available means to garner substantial (not token) reimbursement; this is the ethical arrangement. Instead, UCB reimburses the city for about 10 percent of its cost burden.

Parking

Parking is a scarce resource around the core campus, where UCB monopolizes the parking commons for its own use, and local residents pay the price in increased hardship, traffic, pollution, noise, time, and money. All day neighborhood streets near the campus function as UCB parking lots. In addition, several times per week thousands of visitors flock to venues such as Memorial Stadium, the Greek Theater, Zellerbach Hall, and Haas Pavilion, filling up neighborhood parking spaces. UCB should take steps to minimize and mitigate the parking problems it causes its neighbors.

Traffic

The continuing increase in the number of commuters to both UCB and LBNL has greatly increased city traffic congestion. Access to both requires crossing the city, often through residential neighborhoods. Major special event traffic can bring many streets to a standstill. Significant changes are needed in UCB’s and LBNL’s transportation policies to remove UC traffic from neighborhoods throughout Berkeley.

Walkability

Fortunately, many UCB students, staff, and professors live near and walk to campus—which is one reason maintaining the livability of near-campus neighborhoods is vital. As UCB grows, we must protect and enhance pedestrian pleasure, safety, and access to the campus. Increased walkability will improve the neighborhood character of residential streets near campus (through trees, pedestrian lighting, “eyes on the street,” and crime reduction), and the economic vitality of commercial areas (through more local shopping, street seating, etc.). This will help increase property and sales taxes. Additionally, good walkability can help reduce auto use and ownership.

Construction impacts

The city currently allows UCB to commandeer neighborhood streets, sidewalks, and parking spaces, rather than requiring UCB to use its own available resources. UCB projects last several years, and parking and traffic problems, noise, dust, and other unpleasantness are not the only problem: UCB construction has caused long-term residents to move out of the neighborhoods where they are most needed. When proposed university construction begins downtown, businesses will die without adequate parking, vehicle and pedestrian access, and a pleasant shopping environment.

Memorial Stadium

Memorial Stadium is a beloved structure, but its location creates substantial adverse impacts. These include city-wide traffic problems; parking problems that extend over a mile from the stadium; event noise that permeates local neighborhoods; and patron behavior problems (noise, litter, public drunkenness, and petty delinquency) far beyond the stadium’s surrounding neighborhoods. Straddling the Hayward Fault and attracting crowds of more than 70,000 into a crowded area with narrow streets, the stadium poses a danger to spectators and neighbors alike in the event of a major earthquake, fire, or evacuation. UCB’s determination to “modernize” the stadium and intensify use around it is wrong-headed, but if it goes forward, the university and the city must take extraordinary measures to reduce its damages and dangers.

Strawberry Canyon

Berkeleyans depend on Strawberry Canyon for open space, recreation, and its aesthetic contribution to our urban setting. Leaving aside any new university construction, ongoing UCB and LBNL activities in the canyon contaminate the soil and groundwater, which then moves downhill to pollute more of the city, including Strawberry Creek. Again, the university transfers its damages to city residents.

So when Cal goes for the gold, let’s not forget who’s paying for it. We are.

To support BLUE’s efforts to maintain quality of life in Berkeley, write to blue@igc.org. To support the lawsuit, make checks payable to “Law Offices of Stephan C. Volker” and mail them to 1 Hazel Rd., Berkeley, 94705.

David Baker is a Cal alum, a 43-year resident of Berkeley, and a founding member of BLUE.

Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was born at 207 Mill St. in Grass Valley, high in the Sierra gold country, and spent the first 10 years of his life there. He remembered the town as full of weather-beaten old shacks and rusting machinery. Years later his wife described it as “a place that was nothing in a situation that was nowhere.”

This gives too bleak a picture. During Royce’s childhood Grass Valley had the richest gold mines in California. They yielded a million dollars a year for almost a decade, remained productive for another hundred, and supported a population of 20,000 souls.

Grass Valley’s best-known residents in the early days were Lola Montez, the woman who cast a spell on Bavaria’s king and captivated Gold Rush audiences with her “Spider Dance,” and her little protege, Lotta Crabtree, an actress said to have influenced Mary Pickford’s vigorous dramatic style.

When Lola Montez had had enough of Grass Valley, she moved on to new adventures. The Royce family, having failed to make its fortune, also moved on, to San Francisco where it continued to fare poorly. But at fourteen years of age, Josiah began to display extraordinary talents. He completed a year’s work in mathematics in a matter of days at Boys’ High School, and devised his own logarithm tables. His stunned teachers arranged for him to finish high school at the University of California.

College days

The university Royce entered was a small, struggling school in Oakland. It didn’t move north into the barren Berkeley hills until his junior year. Nevertheless, his undergraduate years were fruitful, and he later said of them:

“The principal philosophical influences of my undergraduate years were: 1. The really very great and deep effect produced upon me by the teaching of Professor Joseph Le Conte—himself a former pupil of Agassiz, a geologist, a comparatively early defender and exponent of the Darwinian theory, and a great light in the firmament of the University of California of those days; 2. The personal influence of Edward Rowland Sill, who was my teacher in English during the last two years of my undergraduate life; 3. The literary influence of John Stewart Mill and Herbert Spencer, both of whom I read during those years.”

By the time he graduated some of his professors believed he should have further schooling. The university did not offer a program in philosophy, his chosen field; for that he needed to go to Europe, if he could find financial assistance. The professors interceded with the university’s president, Daniel Coit Gilman, and he induced some anonymous Berkeley businessmen (still unknown today!) to provide a fund for Royce. The young man wrote to Gilman, “Your influence in getting me this assistance is going to be the making of my whole life.”

Royce studied at Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Gottingen, immersing himself in the brilliant idealistic speculations of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, and developing deep confidence in his own ability. After completing his doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, he had to face the fact that he’d spent years preparing for a career that didn’t exist: there were no philosophy departments in American universities. While he was stuck in this quandary, William Rowland Sill reached out to him with the offer of a position teaching English in Berkeley.

1878—Back to Berkeley

Royce knew he could do great philosophical work and he sensed that Berkeley’s intellectual isolation might stop him from doing it. He accepted Sill’s offer reluctantly. His fears were realistic. Sill wrote to Gilman (now at Johns Hopkins), “He will do excellently well here... only, he must not stay too long in the wilderness for his own good.”

As soon as Royce arrived in Berkeley he began writing to Gilman and others, imploring them to help him find work in the East. These letters give us an unguarded insight into Royce’s situation and an unvarnished picture of academic life in Berkeley’s early days:

“Here in the university I am after all much alone. It is not what it used to be when I was a student. The classmates are scattered, of course; and to be an instructor is to look on old scenes through new glasses. My own students are plastic, sometimes bright, often amusing; but they are no companions. The members of the faculty are cordial enough; but all old teachers are self-absorbed men, with plans of their own. And I have plans of mine too, of course; and so we live for the most part to ourselves, each as happy as he finds it convenient to be, and without much love for communion with the others.” (September, 1878)

“At Berkeley, as you doubtless know, we live on in a very quiet way, without much to make us afraid, and also without much encouragement, kept alive by our own enthusiasm when we have it, and allowed to come as near death as we choose if we find enthusiasm irksome. The public says very little about us and knows, I fear, even less.” (September, 1880)

“Our regents, a miscellaneous and comparatively ignorant body, are by fits and starts meddlesome, always stupid, not always friendly, and never competent or anxious to discover the nature of our work or of our ability.” (May, 1882)

When William James offered him a temporary appointment at Harvard, Royce accepted immediately. He remained there for thirty four years. But he had not wasted his time in Berkeley. He had been pondering the themes of his first two books, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) and California (1886).

The Religious Aspect of

Philosophy

In The Religious Aspect of Philosophy Royce addressed the religious thought of his time which, he considered, “has reached a position which arouses the anxiety of all serious thinkers...” He hoped to reinvigorate it by offering a new philosophical proof for the existence of God.

He presented this proof in a long, complex argument which is not easily summarized. Briefly, then: he argued that our ability to distinguish what is true from what is false, or in error, depends on a source of truth which is independent of us and eternally consistent. He described this source as “an infinite unity of conscious thought to which is present all possible truth.” This consciousness, the Absolute, is God.

Most of us find this notion of the Divine far too abstract and remote, but Royce offered it earnestly as a philosophically secure (and non-denominational) foundation for theology. In the long run, he hoped, it would strengthen religious belief and, ultimately, be of assistance to people in need, “the poor and lonely, the desolate and the afflicted when they demand religious comfort, and want something that shall tell them ... how to take up once more the burdens of their broken existence.”

Royce also argued for the existence of “moral insight” rooted in recognition of the reality of other human beings. A person who rises above his own subjective concerns to an understanding of the moral insight will know it means “...not merely, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ but ‘Insofar as in thee lies, act as if thou wert at once thy neighbor and thyself.’ ‘Treat these two lives as one life.’”

He thought “the great aim” must be to produce the moral insight in as many people as possible, so as “to prepare the way for ... the highest good,” thus bringing about the “sense of community, the power to work together, with clear insight into our reasons for so working.” “This,” he concluded, “is the first need of humanity.” It was the theme of his next book.

California

In 400 densely written pages California (1886) portrays the destruction by the Americans of California’s pastoral, feudal Mexican society, and the conflict within the Americans between their best and worst impulses. Royce saw these events, which were then very recent, as flowing from failures to act in obedience to the moral insight.

As always, his purpose was constructive. He wanted to illustrate how after a period of anarchy, lessons were learned and applied. He found the triumph of the early Californians in the painful and protracted efforts of decent men and women to build homes, businesses, and a workable, just civil government. In Kevin Starr’s words, “The road back from anarchy demonstrated what Royce felt was the very essence of the moral act: the transcending of present evil.”

Some critics have faulted Royce’s interpretation of his material. Charles Chapman, for example, said Royce “selected materials from the standpoint of a previously determined thesis, and made sweeping generalizations from inadequate sources.” He saw California as a moralistic screed written through the lenses of “puritanical glasses.” Even so, it survives as an essential work on the period. And one of its major points—that California is a land where diverse populations must find ways to exist together—is still germane.

The Grass Valley-Josiah Royce Library

Today the beautiful town of Grass Valley honors Josiah Royce, Lola Montez and Lotta Crabtree, without quite knowing who any of them were. The Lola Montez house has been refurbished (and occupied by the Chamber of Commerce); Lotta Crabtree’s is nearby, still a private residence. Royce’s home is long gone, its location marked by a historical placard. It was replaced in 1916 by a public library which, in a gesture which seems genuinely appropriate, has recently been re-named “The Grass Valley-Josiah Royce Branch” of the Nevada County Public Library.

Modern Italian theater began in the 16th century with the first commedia dell’arte troupes. Drawing upon a vast reservoir of fools from every village and town in Italy, they created the well-known masked characters of the lovers Pierrot and Columbine, the old dotard Pantaloon and his constant antagonist the ridiculous Doctor, the intriguer Brighella, the braggart Captain, cowardly Scaramouch, Punchinello, source of the English Punch, and, the most famous clown of all, Harlequin.

The descendants of these zanies can be found on every stage in Europe, but they ring true because they can also be found in our lives and in ourselves.

In Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, William Shakespeare makes a catalog of some of these characters, naming one in particular, “the lean and slippered Pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”

Shakespeare’s description is accurate and detailed, but more importantly he understood that these stock figures of the Captain, the Doctor and Pantaloon, these Masks, are the great archetypes of the human psyche. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is densely populated with the same buffoons and they pop up in everything from Moliere through Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers on to the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

The original commedia companies did not present written plays, but improvised from brief scenarios. They refreshed their memories during performance by glancing at a scenario pinned to the backstage wall. Within these loose structures, they were able to go on endlessly improvising comic scenes for the length of a show. Every time they returned to a scenario, they were free to add to, subtract from, or change it in whatever direction seemed to be working at the moment of performance. Acrobatics, juggling, legerdemain, song and dance were all part of their repertoire.

Over time, some of these scenarios became fixed into actual plays and among the most famous is Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters which was written for Gennaro Sacco around 1746. Known as Sacchi, he was considered the greatest Harlequin of his time and his particular variation on the standard Arlecchino was the Mask of Truffaldino, the servant of the title.

This play was written during Goldoni’s evolution from classic commedia toward a more naturalistic, Moliere-influenced comedy in which the written text triumphed over improvisation. In fact, Goldoni probably incorporated much of the comic improvisation and physical action of the performers into the play as published in 1753. We are able to see the old improvised commedia shining through Goldoni’s nascent reformed style.

The words of the play are almost inconsequential. The simple scenario is all that matters: two pairs of lovers are thwarted for three acts by Pantaloon, the Doctor, Brighella and Harlequin (Truffaldino in Goldoni’s text) who appear here as two fathers, an innkeeper and a servant, respectively.

Mozart loved this play and considered making it into an opera in 1783. Michael Redgrave played one of the lovers in a 1928 amateur production when he was still a student at Cambridge. Impresario Max Reinhardt, who produced and directed the 1935 film version of Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed it many times, but it was the great 20th century Italian director, Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997), founder of the Piccolo Teatro di Milan in 1947, who created the modern form of this play that same year as Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters.

He closed the Piccolo Teatro’s first season with an astoundingly fresh revival of the Goldoni classic featuring Marcello Moretti in the title role. Moretti reintroduced improvised business into the play and what had seemed a death mask came to life again. After not having been played in Italy almost since the time of Goldoni, it became the longest running play in Italian theater history with Strehler eventually recasting the play a further 10 times.

Ferruccio Soleri, who joined Piccolo Teatro di Milano in 1958, became identified with the role of Arlecchino after a 1960 performance substituting for Moretti at the City Center in New York. He continued understudying Moretti until 1963 when, transcending merely copying Moretti, he became the definitive Arlecchino. Soleri might have been daunted by the loss of the commedia tradition over the previous two centuries. Instead, he reached down into his own comic soul to find again our common foolishness and humanity. He will be performing the role he has owned for the last 45 years this week in Berkeley with Piccolo Teatro di Milan as part of a world farewell tour that began in 1977 and hopefully will continue well into the future.

The Piccolo Teatro di Milano will perform Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters with English supertitles at Zellerbach Playhouse at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26 through Saturday, Oct. 29 with matinees on Sat., Oct. 29 at 2 p.m. and on Sun., Oct. 30 at 3 p.m. During the run of this production there will also be lectures, conferences, pre-performance talks and an exhibition of commedia dell’arte costumes and masks in the Zellerbach Playhouse Lobby. For tickets and more information call 642-9988, or see www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.

Luigi Ciminachi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano

Company members in Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s production of Arlecchino, servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters).›

“Breaking the Silence: Israeli Soldiers Speak Out Against the Occupation” Photography exhibit and presentation at 12:45 p.m. at Boalt Hall, UC Campus and at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Friends’ Church, 1600 Sacramento at Cedar. Presented by American Friends Service Committee and Jewish Voice for Peace. 415-565-0201, ext. 26.

FILM

Experimental Works from Bay Area Schools at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.

READINGS AND LECTURES

Berkeley Arts Festival A reading of Arnie Passman’s play, “Soul Control; Control of Soul” by James King and Allen Taylor at 8 p.m. at 2324 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com

Clifford Brown 75th Birthday Celebration Trumpet Summit with Arturo Sandoval, Benny Golson, Randy Brecker and many more at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $18-$30. 238-9200.

James Low, Fadrmer, Firecracker at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com

The Eddie Haskells, Trouble Maker, The Insurgents at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926.

Midnite, reggae from St. Croix, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25-$27. 548-1159.

Guru Garage, jazz funk, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277.

Clifford Brown 75th Birthday Celebration Trumpet Summit with Arturo Sandoval, Benny Golson, Randy Brecker and many more at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $18-$30. 238-9200.

SATURDAY, OCT. 29

CHILDREN

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Betsy Rose, music for the fall season, at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568.

I don’t usually do advocacy; sitting back and watching things go to hell is more my style. But with Halloween approaching, it seems like an auspicious time to make a pitch for the barn owls of Berkeley.

All owls are somewhat uncanny, and barn owls, with their ghostly heart-shaped faces and rasping cries, are more so than most. Having one fly into your headlights on a back road in south Texas can be an unsettling experience, one that both the owl and I survived.

Particularly in England, a lot of odd notions have accrued around the barn owl: familiar of witches, harbinger of death, forecaster of hailstorms. It shows up as a bird of ill omen in Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Keats. There is also the old belief, current in the Ozarks until fairly recently, that owl eggs are an infallible cure for alcoholism.

The real bird behind the myths is a pretty neat creature, and I’ve touched on some of its attributes in an earlier column. The placement of its ears and its neural architecture allow it to hunt in total darkness by triangulating on high-frequency sounds. For years, barn owls brought in to a wildlife rehab program in Fresno that were too badly injured to be released were sent to Stanford for acoustical research, ultimately leading to the development of the human cochlear implant.

Barn owls, unusually for birds of prey, don’t seem put off by the human presence. Cavity-nesters in the wild, they’ll use man-made structures or ornamental street trees. They seem to have a particular liking for palms, nesting up inside the fronds. According to Cathy Garner, who runs that Fresno program, the scarcity of barns and dead trees has prompted more and more barn owls, rural and urban, to switch to palms. Several of the Berkeley nest sites I’m aware of are in palm trees, usually of the Canary Island date variety.

Unfortunately for the owls, some Berkeley property owners have decided they don’t want them in the neighborhood. This year alone, two palms that historically hosted owl nests have been felled—one near Bancroft and Edwards, another on Curtis—and there may be more that I haven’t heard about. Some of the responsible parties have claimed liability concerns, but I suspect the real reason is the noise: young owls can make quite a racket when begging for food, and keep it up most of the night.

Why should anyone tolerate such a nuisance? I would submit that the barn owl’s services as a predator—a rodent control agent—far outweigh the short-term annoyance factor. Barn owls specialize in small rodents, of the field mouse size class; they’ll also take shrews (which are not strictly speaking rodents), young rabbits, and the occasional bird or reptile. Unlike great horned owls, they would be unlikely to go after a house cat. Proportions of prey species vary from habitat to habitat, but a Louisiana study reported that house mice made up 15 per cent of the diet of the local owls, with non-native rats accounting for another 5 percent.

You can tell what a barn owl has been eating by teasing apart the pellets it coughs up and going through the skeletal remains. It’s harder to quantify the bird’s appetite. I’ve read that a Lord Lilford—not a Harry Potter character but a real British peer—had a tame barn owl that would take mice from his hand. He once fed the bird nine mice at one sitting, then, after a three-hour breather, four more. That may still stand as the individual mouse-eating record.

Consumption peaks when a barn owl pair is raising its family. An owlet can eat its weight in mice in one night—and before it fledges, its weight will have overshot the typical one-pound bulk of an adult. The only calculation I’ve been able to find of how this would translate into rodents was done by Bruce Colvin, based on his field work in Ohio and New Jersey: a brood of six (not unusual for these prolific birds) can consume 600 field mice in the 10 weeks it takes them to become independent and begin hunting on their own.

Without knowing the barn owl population of Berkeley, it’s hard to extrapolate further. But I have a feeling there are more than enough mice and rats to go around. Brown and black rats thrive in beds of ivy. A couple of years ago, an ivy-removal project I was involved with on the west side of town prompted complaints from neighbors about a rat invasion. They didn’t invade; they had just been rendered visible. And as for mice—the mice that once ate all the labels off my wine bottles, the mice that twice have bedded down inside my stove—well, don’t get me started. If you bake a lot, you don’t want stove mice. You think moose turd pie is unappetizing? Try mouse pee pie. And my associate Matt the Cat is an abject failure as a mouser. He’ll go as far as pointing them, but he leaves the dirty work up to me.

So we do need those owls. And I’m happy to report that Lisa Owens Viani, Berkeley writer/editor/naturalist, is launching a pro-owl organization called Keep Barn Owls in Berkeley. Her goal is to educate palm-tree owners about the benefits of having owls as neighbors. (Nest boxes are actually safer than palm trees, which the nestlings have a tendency to fall out of; we’d like to see more of the boxes that went up at Cesar Chavez Park some time back). If you’re interested in helping, e-mail Lisa: lowensvi@earthlink.net. Or contact me via the Daily Planet. ›

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join us on a series of monthly excursions exploring our Regional Parks. Meets at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area. For information and to register call 525-2233.

Celebrate Halloween with Bats with Maggie Hooper of the Bat Conservation Fund at 6:30 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.

“Einstein the Peacenik” with Dr. Lawrence Badash, Professor Emeritus, History of Science, UC Santa Barbara, at 7 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High School. Free, all welcome.

Berkeley High School Site Council meets at 4:30 p.m. in Conference Room B in the Admin. Building. On the agenda are Intervention updates (including 10th grade counseling), a discussion of the IB process and timeline and subcommittee sign ups. 525-0124.

Berkeley PC Users Group Problem solving and beginners meeting to answer, in simple English, users questions about Windows computers. At 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St. corner of Eunice. All welcome, no charge. 527-2177.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 26

Flu Shots for Berkeley Residents age 60 or over or “high-risk” from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5300.

Albany Measure A Special Election and Education Funding with Assemblymember Loni Hancock and Alameda County Superintendant of Schools Sheila Jordan at 4 p.m. at Albany High School, outdoor amphitheater in courtyard, corner of Key Route and Thousand Oaks. 282-8577.

“Healing the Trauma of Enslavement” Maafa Awareness Month panel discussion at 7 p.m. at Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St. Free and open to the public. 261-8436, ext. 2.

Easy Does It Disability Assitance Board meeting at 6:30 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center. All welcome. 845-5513. www.easyland.org

“Choosing and Preparing for a New Dog or Cat” at 7:30 p.m. at dogTec, 5221 Central Ave. #1. 644-0729. www.openpaw.org

The Truth About Bats with bat conservationist Maggie Hooper at 7 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free. For school age children. 525-6155.

Lunar Lounge Express, A party under the stars to view the Red planet at 8 p.m. at the Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $15-20. 336-7300. www.chabotspace.org

Day of the Dead Celebration on Solano Ave. Gather at 6:30 p.m. at Solano and Alameda. Bring a photo of those you wish to remember, a candle, flowers or food to feed their souls. 527-5358. www.solanoave.org

Three Beats for Nothing sings early music for fun and practice at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 655-8863.

Cinéma and Dinner at The Alliance Française of Berkeley at 7 p.m. at 2004 Woolsey St. Free, but everybody brings something. 548-7481 or afberkeley@sbcglobal.net

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Haunted House performance tour at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 6 p.m. at Oakland School for the Arts, 1800 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5-$7, children under 7 free. 873-8800.

Halloween Bazaar with face painting, children's games, apple bobbing, pumpkins, rummage sale, book sale, food, crafts, and a haunted house from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The New School of Berkeley, 1606 Bonita St. at Cedar. 548-9165.

“Gaza Disengagement and the Importance of Equal Rights for Palestinians” with Ilan Pappe, historian and senior lecturer in political science at Haifa University. at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Cost is $20.

Village Gathering for African Americans with Disabilities A day of information, resources and suppot at the Cesar Chavez Educational Center, 2825 International Blvd., Oakland. Conference from 8:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. followed by vendor fair to 4 p.m. 547-7322, ext. 15.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312.

SUNDAY, OCT. 30

Remember to Set Your Clocks Back at 2 a.m.

Pumpkin Carving Bring your own pumpkin and we will get cretive in carving them. From 2 to 4 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Autumn Family Day at the Richmond Art Center Pumpkin-carving, mask-making, apple-bobbing and performan-

Opinion

Editorials

In September of 2001, the average house in zip code 94703 sold for $375,000. In September of 2005, the average house in 94703 sold for $780,000.

Is this fact relevant to the current crusade by 94703 homeowners to rid their neighborhood of undesired elements? It’s certainly not the whole story, but it should be kept in mind when trying to analyze what’s going on there, especially when the focus of the unwanted activities is the home of someone who pre-dates the rise in property values.

It’s a daunting task to try to explain the Constitution of the United States to homeowners with blood in their eyes, but we’ll give it a shot. Parts of a couple of articles in the Bill of Rights are relevant to the situation.

The stated intent of the complaining 94703 residents is to force the defendant, a neighboring homeowner, to sell her property, whether she wants to or not. The intention appears to be to punish her for allowing persons previously convicted of criminal behavior, who might or might not be related to her, to hang around her house. There are also allegations that such persons are repeating the criminal behavior for which they were previously convicted.

Even if all the allegations of the complainants are true as charged, is it constitutional or wise to use the small claims court to try them? If anyone, the long-term homeowner defendant herself or one of her associates, has broken a criminal law, shouldn’t they be charged and tried in accordance with the Constitution? The problem is that the small claims court, where the complainants have filed their complaint, does not offer the legal procedure which the Constitution requires for those charged with criminal offenses.

Article VI spells out how it should be done:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury … and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”

Small claims court offers none of the above protections. And then there’s Article V: “… nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...”

The defendant homeowner has been subject, for the same offence, whatever it is or was, to a previous round of small claims prosecutions, but the judgment against her was never collected. Should she have to go through the whole thing again? Is it a good use of the small claims system to accumulate uncollectible judgments against an elderly defendant? Does this attempt to force her to sell her property meet the due process of law requirement? If she loses this round, some attorney will probably raise these constitutional questions at some point in time.

Not that the complainants don’t have a major point, of course. No one should have to live in a neighborhood where criminal behavior is tolerated. But stopping criminal behavior should be the responsibility of the police, not of the small claims court, which can do nothing to stop real crimes.

It’s dangerously naïve to think that forcing one elderly homeowner to sell her house by getting another uncollectible small claims judgment against her will stop the drug-dealing in the 94703 area. What will, eventually, change the kind of criminal activity in this neighborhood is the numbers at the top of this piece. It’s only a matter of time before the kind of people whose major means of support is street crime will be forced out of 94703 by economic pressure. But they’ll just move to another neighborhood, inflicting their anti-social behavior on a new group of less-affluent neighbors.

A West Berkeley renter of my acquaintance told me that she complained about her downstairs neighbor’s drug-dealing, first to the police and then, when nothing happened, to her city-funded “area coordinator.” He told her that her only remedy was to use the organization which is promoting the small claims solution. A homeowner I know in another city finally had to move because her local police didn’t seem interested in stopping prostitutes from doing business in the alley next to her house. Where are the police in these situations?

On Wednesday night at about 11:30 we dropped friends at a Fourth Street parking lot where they’d left their car. There were two police cars parked side by side in the empty lot. In the 15 minutes it took us to get home (94705) we saw six more parked police cars on the street. We drove by the corner of Oregon and California, the focus of these lawsuits, but there were no police cars in evidence there. If the situation is as described by the complaining neighbors, at least one of those eight parked police cars could have been doing some good on that corner at that time of night. We’d welcome a commentary from someone in authority explaining, in detail, why the police can’t seem to do anything about drug-dealing in South and West Berkeley.

• • •

One more thing: No matter how just complainants might think their cause is, there are some tactics which are beneath contempt. We have, with some misgivings, printed in this issue yet another letter from one of them, even though we think she’s finally stooped too low. She’s now trying to go after the teaching job of a (perhaps even misguided) civil libertarian who came to the defense in these pages, on humane grounds, of the old lady who’s the defendant in the lawsuit.

We think the teacher, Andrea Pritchett, is pretty tough, and she can probably defend her job on her own, so we decided to run the letter. If the writer is willing to put these sentiments in a letter, she’s probably also expressing them elsewhere, so it’s better to get them out in the open for public scrutiny.

But we want to go on record as telling the writer, as strongly as we know how, that we think it’s reprehensible to go after the job of someone with whom you disagree on a matter of principle. Andrea Pritchett doesn’t deserve to be fired for thinking you’re a bigot. We’re old enough to remember Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, who specialized in this kind of attack. If you’re not, go see Good Night and Good Luck.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On Monday morning I sat down at the computer to do my duty by writing an editorial telling our (very few) clueless readers how to vote in the ridiculous special election. Before I wrote it, I checked my e-mail, and mirabile dictu, my friend Kim in Santa Cruz had already forwarded to me this excellent AlterNet piece on the very same topic. I took this as a sign from on high that I could skip my usual two hours of work, since I had nothing to add—except one thing. Here in Greater Berkeley a few of us have a tendency to think we’re so advanced we don’t need to vote anymore, and that our votes might not be counted right anyhow. This one’s different. We don’t just need to win, we need to rack up really big majorities to put Schwarzenegger in his place once and for all. Vote early and often, and tell your friends.

—Becky O’Malley

Daily Planet Executive Editor

Eight initiatives. Hundreds of millions of dollars corralled by interest groups for ad buys to move the voters. And a 77-page voter guide mailed to each California citizen that, while obscure and incomprehensible, communicates in a crisp, bold font that the political process is safely out of their hands.

The Nov. 8 special election in California has been presented by Arnold Schwarzenegger as a way for voters to join him in his revolution for the Golden State; something the Democratic-controlled State Legislature wanted absolutely nothing to do with since he showed up in Sacramento in 2003. So it’s now up to the voters. If they reject the proposals Arnold has backed to the hilt, then it’s a sudden end of a rather unspectacular political career.

The four big ones on which Schwarzenegger has staked his political career are, as Bill Bradley described in L.A. Weekly, a “shrunken agenda of toughening teacher tenure rules (Prop. 74), weakening public-employee unions (Prop. 75), gaining new budget powers (Prop. 76), and taking redistricting out of the Legislature’s hands (Prop. 77).”

Gosh, and you wonder why the Democrats in the Assembly don’t want anything to do with Arnold.

One way of looking at this is that since Schwarzenegger failed to destroy his opposition in the normal political process, he outsourced the battle to the established clique of Republican funders in California. Bob Mulholland, a strategist for the California Democratic Party, told me that “Schwarzenegger is backing initiatives that he and his supporters could never pass in the Legislature.” We’ll see if the people want to have anything to do with Arnold.

There are two progressive initiatives on the ballot as well: 79, which would help folks get discounts on their pharmaceuticals and allows big Pharma to be sued by anyone for profiteering; and 80, which would, to blur its extraordinarily complicated proscription, make the energy market in California better for both consumers and the environment. Prop. 79 is so progressive that drug companies created their own, pseudo-79 initiative, 78, which would make a discount process voluntary for the drug companies to partake in.

Finally, there’s Prop. 73, which would require teenage girls to get consent from their parents before they could have an abortion. The plan is that 73 will do for Schwarzenegger—who is ostensibly pro-choice—what the 18 gay marriage amendments on state ballots did for George Bush in 2004; function as a blooming, fragrant rose that beckons Christian conservative bees to come and vote their Leviticus as they pollinate his corporate agenda.

Breaking it down

Here’s a breakdown of the propositions, with ballot measure “summaries” from that vile 77-page voter guide, and background from research and interviews with activists and public interest groups.

The California Catholic Bishops’ guiding light for their support of Prop. 73 is that their “Catholic Catechism teaches that the family is the ‘privileged community’ wherein children are meant to grow in wisdom, stature and grace. We are also counseled to work with public authorities to ensure that the family’s prerogatives are not usurped.”

Good luck, girls, if you and your parents share different prerogatives.

The key argument “against” Prop. 73 in the voter guide, co-authored by the president of the California Nurses Association, is no on Proposition 73.”

Prop. 74: “Increases probationary period for public school teachers from two to five years. Modifies the process by which school boards can dismiss a teaching employee who receives two consecutive unsatisfactory performance evaluations.”

A misleader if there ever were. The fact is that all California teachers get no guarantee of anything after two years, except for a “right to a hearing before they are dismissed,” as Barbara Kerr of the California Teachers Association puts it. After reading up on this proposition, it looks to me like this effort is an attempt to Wal-Martize the public school teaching profession and create a dispensable and “flexible” employment stream.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s “Join Arnold” campaign that pushes his four signature initiatives fails to conceal its true goal for 74, weakening the teachers’ union: “Union bosses have blocked many education reforms and just want voters to throw more tax money at education with no reform!” Karla Jones, the 2004 California Educator of the Year, hailing from the worker’s paradise of Orange County, is the shiny buckle on the belt that holds Schwarzenegger’s pants up on Prop. 74.

Prop. 75: “This measure amends state statutes to require public employee unions to get annual, written consent from a government employee in order to charge and use that employee’s dues or fees for political purposes. This requirement would apply to both members and nonmembers of a union. The measure would also require unions to keep certain records, including copies of any consent forms.”

If that language doesn’t get the point across, here’s a simpler one: let’s make it hard for unions to collect money in support of political candidates who might protect them from bastards like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Untold millions have been poured into this one by both sides. And millions were poured into a similar measure in 1998, which was soundly defeated. Columnist Harold Meyerson wrote a great article about 75, saying in effect that it’s a move to help kill the California Democratic Party:

Proposition 75 ... was crafted to sound like a union-democracy issue, requiring public-sector unions to obtain members’ written permission for political spending. In fact, such union members already have the right to withhold their dues for such purposes, and roughly 20 percent of unionized state workers do exactly that. The greater goal of the measure is simply to hamstring unions’ electoral endeavors and thereby remove the linchpin of the Democrats’ mobilization efforts.

But Schwarzenegger has a counter to all this “spin.” He’s dubbed Prop. 75 the “Paycheck Protection Act.” He’s got the Nobel Prize winnin’ economist Milton Friedman on his side, whose longstanding contributions to the CEO-worshipping society we live in still garner moments of silence in Chambers of Commerce across the country. Arnold also dug up a Zell Miller turncoat type to parade around with him: Deputy Sheriff Allan Mansoor, who hails from that gritty, sweat-stained heart of the workers’ movement that Woodie Guthrie sang so often about, Orange County.

This description from the voter guide captures just how profoundly antidemocratic this election is. Why don’t they have jail sentences for the people who write these in such fashion? It’s criminal. Basically, Prop. 76 gives significant power of the purse to the executive branch, and oh yeah, is expected by its opponents to slash funding for public schools by $4 billion. Join Arnold calls it an effort to “stabilize education funding to make sure our public schools are getting the money they need.” Schwarzenegger’s campaign makes no mention of the power grab buried in the legal text.

Here’s the one proposition worthy of some debate. It’s got the support of progressive groups like Common Cause and California Public Interest Research Groups, who argue in essence that party-controlled redistricting is so refined, so insane, that among all 153 of California’s congressional and legislative seats that were voted on in the last election, not one changed parties. There’s obviously something wrong with that.

As Steven Hill wrote for AlterNet, “The 2001 redistricting in California was a travesty. The Democratic incumbents paid $20,000 apiece to the political consultant drawing the district lines—who happened to be the brother of one incumbent—to draw each of them a “safe seat” where they would easily win re-election. It was like paying protection money to a Mafia don for your turf.”

That’s not a functioning democratic system. However, just because there’s something wrong with California’s redistricting laws doesn’t mean this approach is the answer. Although this observation is powerfully obvious, it’s one that the reform groups supporting Prop. 77 must have overlooked. The approach of 77 stinks, as the L.A. Weekly explained in its endorsement list of initiatives: “Under this plan, the district boundaries would be set only after national parties spend millions, perhaps billions, to persuade voters to adopt (or reject) a proposal for district lines. Then the court hearings. Then back to the judges to try again, even though they already submitted their best effort.” Not only this, but 77 establishes that makeup of the judges will be chosen by ... politicians.

Steven Hill offers an alternative, something—gasp!—slightly more radical for California: “If Governor Schwarzenegger and others really want to do something about the ills of redistricting, simply changing who draws the district lines won’t accomplish much. It’s necessary to get rid of California’s antiquated winner-take-all system, and adopt some version of the more modern proportional representation system.”

Prop. 78: “Establishes discount prescription drug program for certain low- and moderate-income Californians. Authorizes Department of Health Services to contract with participating pharmacies for discounts and with participating drug manufacturers for rebates.”

Sounds great. We all want this, don’t we? Once again the evil lurking in this neutral language from the voter guide is overwhelming. Why doesn’t it say that this is a voluntary measure that these drug companies can opt out of? I’ll tell you why. Because the California government isn’t run by you. It’s in someone else’s hands.

When I spoke with CalPIRG healthcare advocate Emily Clayton, she told me that Prop. 78 was born on the day drug companies heard about the proposition that her group and others were working for, 79 (which I’ll get to in a bit). So four companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, kicked in $10 million each, and another four kicked in $5 million, and by the time the snowball stopped rolling, they had assembled an $80 million war chest. Eighty million dollars for a meaningless initiative, aimed at undermining another one.

As Prop. 78’s opponents point out with a devastating piece of logic, the drug companies don’t need a ballot initiative to establish a voluntary discount system. If it’s voluntary, they could start right now. If drug companies care about discounts for the poor and elderly, as they claim to do, to the tune of $80 million, why haven’t they already?

Clayton told me she was heartened that despite a constant barrage of TV ads, field polls indicated the public understood 78 bad, 79 good. Good thing too, because Prop. 79’s advocates have a shade under $2 million to get their initiative through.

Real help, real savings to “Californians with catastrophic medical expenses who spend at least five percent of their income on medical expenses; the uninsured who earn up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level; Californians on Medicare for drug costs not fully covered by Medicare; Seniors, the chronically ill, and others with inadequate drug coverage through private insurers or their employer.”

The drug companies’ prediction of what will happen if 79 passes, is tell-tale and prophetic: “The measure is so poorly written it will result in years of legal challenges and will never get approval by the federal government.” Read here, we’ll take this to court and spend another $80 million, and if that fails we’ve got friends in higher places who will stomp on California’s laws.

And there’s one more thing about the 78 vs. 79 feud. If both pass with a majority, then the one with the most votes wins, and the other is null.

Last and the most arcane, I actually don’t mind this description offered in the voter guide. Except that the “customers” referred to aren’t you and me, they are huge consumers of electricity, like factories and large corporations. And that opens up a discussion about the fact that some lucky businesses are allowed to “switch” their energy sources while the rest of California isn’t.

After a conversation with Emily Rusch, another CalPIRG advocate, I learned that big corporations in California get to pick and choose the low-hanging volts, while everyone else is stuck with whatever wrinkled electricity provider is thrust upon us. As a result, companies have less of a stake in the quality and efficiency of a particular energy grid, because they can cut and run when the power supply is spotty or less convenient. Prop. 80 also requires energy companies to meet new energy demands with renewable energy resources and higher energy efficiency measures as first options.

A ballot initiative like this one doesn’t begin to lock horns with the fundamental flaws in California’s energy market. But a heavy vote in Prop. 80’s favor will at least signal to Sacramento that energy reform has popular public appeal.